Ascension of the Beast
by LigerEye
Summary: The Titans' greatest victory sowed the seeds for their dissolution. What will come in the lives of Beast Boy and Raven after their surrogate family separates?
1. Prologue: For Want of a Foe

**Disclaimer:** If I owned the Teen Titans, do you really think I'd be posting this story here?

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**Ascension of the Beast**

**Prologue**

**For Want of a Foe**

To everyone else, January 1 was a happy time, filled with hope and joy for the beginning of a new year and welcoming the hopefully constructive changes to come. This would, on any previous year, have been the prevalent sentiment in Titans Tower as well, but this year was different. For Richard Grayson, Koriand'r of Tamaran, Victor Stone, Rachel Roth, and Garfield Logan, there was very little joy in welcoming this particular new year.

To achieve the greatest victory can sometimes be a mixed blessing. When the Teen Titans conclusively defeated the Brotherhood of Evil and relegated such a large number of villains to cryogenic slumber, it was cause for great celebration. However, even the most triumphant of acts can have unforeseen consequences which unfortunately alter the lives of the actors.

What is a hero without a villain? The absence of metahuman criminals can only mean the elimination of the need for metahuman crime fighters. Not long after the Titans returned from their adventures in Japan, it quickly became clear that Jump City no-longer needed them in the same way it had prior. The Titans found themselves, more often than ever before, simply lounging around the Tower, trying to pass the time. Boredom was just the first of the negative consequences.

Jump City lacked the corruption which was notable in such other places as Gotham. This fact had always played in the Titans' favor before, but honest politicians tend to be honest in their concerns over public spending. For want of a foe, the Titans no-longer had much purpose; for want of a purpose, the funding they had previously enjoyed from the city was no-longer justified.

The budget cuts began in the year following their return. Initially, Robin and Beast Boy were able to make up the difference with private funding they had respectively negotiated from Wayne Enterprises and Dayton Industries. However, each new fiscal year brought new cuts, and, by the time of Beast Boy's eighteenth birthday, the vast majority of the Titans' funding ultimately came from these two private sources.

It helped that Beast Boy acquired his full inheritance of his biological parents' estate, but the situation was unsustainable. Nearly as soon as Beast Boy obtained control of the Logan estate, both Batman and Mento decided that it was entirely unreasonable to continue spending money and resources in a city which no longer needed the effort. The Titans were without a niche and the JCPD could easily handle policing the remaining criminal elements.

Beast Boy's inheritance, while certainly substantial, could only go so far. Mark and Marie Logan were scientists after all, not capitalists. Although it took a great effort to convince Beast Boy to disclose exactly how much money he had inherited, Robin was eventually able to calculate that, if they continued the team with the Logan money, Beast Boy would be completely broke within 15 months. As much as everyone hated the prospect, the writing was on the wall.

The Teen Titans were more than just a team. They were the closest thing to a family that any of the them had, and Beast Boy was completely willing to spend every last dime of his fortune to keep his 'pack' together. However, Robin was entirely unwilling to allow his teammate, friend and surrogate brother to spend away his entire inheritance on maintaining a team of crime fighters which no-longer had a purpose.

On Labor Day, Robin finally decided to put the question of disbanding the team to a vote. Although it was ultimately difficult for any of them to accept the idea of breaking up their family, dissolution carried the vote by a margin of three-to-two. It was entirely unsurprising that Beast Boy would be in the dissenting column, but it was somewhat surprising that the team's more logical and solitary member joined him. But Raven, of course, had her reasons—as much as she was introverted, there was no one in the world she could trust like she trusted her four teammates, and there were exceedingly few people who would give any effort to understanding her. It also didn't help that she had no idea what she was going to do without the team and, like Beast Boy, she was (secretly, as is the case of any of her emotional responses) quite fearful of major changes.

The three who voted in the affirmative all had options they could fall back on. Cyborg could choose either to join the Titans East or to accept a position with S.T.A.R. Labs. Starfire could either return to Tamaran and resume her reign as Grand Ruler, or follow Robin wherever he decided to go. Robin could either set himself up as the solitary hero Starfire had seen in her trip to the future, or he could go to Tamaran as Starfire's consort. But the options for the team's youngest two members were scant, and neither was particularly ready to let go.

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**AN:** I know the prologue is quite short and lacks any dialogue whatsoever, but I'm just using it to set up the background for the story's proper beginning.


	2. Chapter I: New Year's Day

**Disclaimer:** Nope, I still don't own the Teen Titans.

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**Ascension of the Beast**

**Chapter I**

**New Year's Day**

'Twas the early morning hours of New Year's Day; and all through Titans Tower, not a creature was stirring... well, except for the Titans' resident demidemoness. In spite of all of her attempts to manage her emotions via meditation, Raven had found herself completely unable to fall asleep. The Titans had to be out of the Tower by 3:00 PM, at which point the city was to take over the land in preparation of the renovation of the Tower into a museum in the Titans' honor. As of this day, she would lose her home of five years.

Timid was especially being a handful. '_W-we s-still h-have n-no w-where to g-go,'_ said the weepy emotion, who then exploded in a tempest of tears. '_W-w-we're g-g-g-going t-to end u-up l-l-living in a c-cardboard b-b-box and w-we're n-never g-going t-to s-s-see a-a-any of our f-friends ag-g-gain',_ the gray emotion continued while crying.

'_Shut up, Timid! I don't have the time to deal with you right now!'_ Raven thought in reply to her fearful emotion. Raven knew Timid was—for once—entirely justified in her panic, but descending into an emotional mess was not going to help her with her predicament. She hated feeling fear, and wished that Brave would be more vocal; but the green-cloaked emotion was, along with Happy and Wisdom, quite occupied at the moment with lending Timid shoulders to cry on, and could not readily add her part to the discussion. Rude was, of course, little help, and Knowledge was busy trying to find a solution. Rage, on the other hand, was as expressive as ever.

'_Stupid ingrates!'_ the red emotion screamed, '_we should've just let Trigon destroy them!'_ It was no secret in Nevermore that the reason Raven was losing her home was because the city no-longer wanted to fund a team of superheroes. But what cut worse was the fact that none of the Titans were even getting any sort of parting bonus, and years of living on short budgets had left Raven, together with Cyborg and Starfire, with no remaining savings. While the others had made their own arrangements, Raven was still trapped by her circumstances.

Raven had been searching for jobs for the past three months, but there was nothing available in Jump City which called upon her particular skill set, and every application she turned in either was turned down outright, or never received a reply. Beast Boy certainly was another one who would be unemployed, but his inheritance gave him something to live on and he had his parents' house in Los Angeles to fall back on for a home. Starfire and Robin would also not be finding work on Earth, but this is mainly because they chose to return to Tamaran, where they would become the supreme ruling couple of the planetary system.

Cyborg was the only one who was able to find a job on Earth. His years as the Titans' in-house primary physician had given him experience that was in high demand. Between Beast Boy's screwy genetics and Starfire's alien origins, this experience made him a perfect candidate to join the staff of S.T.A.R. Labs' Los Angeles facility. The extremely close friendship between Cyborg and Beast Boy also played into the metal man's favor, as Beast Boy was more than willing to spare him a room until he could afford a place of his own. Indeed, it had been Beast Boy who brought the idea up as soon as he learned that Cy would also be moving to LA.

'_Maybe I should have asked Gar if I could stay with him and Vic for a while,'_ the empath thought to herself, '_after all, the three of us have had a special bond ever since their little trip to Nevermore.'_ "And we've grown even closer since Tokyo," she thought aloud. The three had experienced the common bond of being the outsiders to Robin and Starfire's new relationship. Indeed, over time this trio became essentially as close-knit as the couple themselves.

_'__The grass stain owes us, after all,'_ Rude interjected, before letting out a burp. It was true—after the Titans first met, Raven learned that Beast Boy had been living in the Park since he arrived in Jump City. Unwilling to abandon him to the elements, the empath allowed him to stay with her in her old apartment while the Tower was under construction. Their time as roommates served as a foundation to the special relationship the two would share over the years ahead.

'_B-but what i-if he s-says n-n-no?'_ Timid asked in reply. '_W-we've been s-so mean to him o-over the y-years, w-what if h-he d-doesn't want to d-deal w-with us a-anymore?'_

'_For certain, Garfield has always been an enigma to us,'_ Wisdom added, '_but I do not believe his past actions suggest any sort of grudge. Indeed, his deeds here [in Nevermore], the fact that he consoled us after Malchior hurt us, and the whole Beast incident all seem to show that he cares very deeply for us. I doubt very much that he would say no, especially if the alternative has us living on the streets.'_

'_Yeah, Rae-Rae,'_ Happy joined the conversation, '_Beastie Boo is one of our best friends. He's not gonna say no to us. And besides, I don't think I'll be me anymore if he's not there with us, always trying to make you laugh and smile and show more of my side!'_ Raven cringed at the pink-clad emotion's words.

Rage was oddly silent at this point. Years ago, Raven would have expected that Rage might suggest some act of violence against the changeling, but the manifestation of all of her anger seemed to have a very deep secret. Raven could not tell if the red-cloaked emotion had simply gotten used to Beast Boy or if something else was going on, but for some reason Rage was no-longer quite herself when it came to the green changeling. Rage herself hated that she couldn't hate Beast Boy, but she had her reasons.

'_Gar has always cared about us, and he will never allow us to be homeless,'_ Affection noted in the sweetest voice she could conjure, '_besides, as much as you want to deny it, to be suddenly plunged into silence and solitude after all these years of him and Vic being there to offer their company and try to make you happy will drive you insane. It's bad enough that Dick and Kori are going to be in a different galaxy, do you really want to lose contact with the rest of your closest friends? We need them. Especially Gar!'_ Affection's words made sense, although Raven was unable to understand why Affection was placing such an emphasis on Beast Boy, while Cyborg had been considerably less annoying over the years.

Timid's mood improved with her sisters' words, and she was finally able to add something constructive to the dialogue. '_H-he has always been th-there to make us f-feel better when we were s-sad or h-hurt,'_ the gray-cloaked emotion noted. _'He w-was there for us when M-Malchior hurt us. H-he was th-the only one.'_

Raven continued to mull it over, but ultimately made up her mind. "I guess it's decided," the violet-haired woman said, to no one in particular, while she stared out the window in the common room, "I'll ask him when he gets up." She then glanced at the time on her communicator. "4:00 AM, this'll take a while," she said to herself, expecting that the changeling would not be awake until at least 11:00. "Now would probably be a good time to get some rest," she said as she began en route to her bedroom; she hadn't slept all night, and today was not going to be a good day to be without sleep.

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A few hours later, Raven's sleep was interrupted by a knock at her door. "WHAT?!" she exclaimed in a voice which imparted both drowsiness and mild annoyance, before remembering what day it was. Nearly immediately after the word left her mouth, she remembered the circumstances of her rest.

"Uh, sorry Rae," a familiar voice answered from the other side of her door. "You slept in pretty late and I was wondering if everything's okay," the voice responded. Raven glanced at her clock, which read 11:32 AM; it was probably best that she get up now anyway.

"My name is Ra**_ven_**!" the dark empath began her reply. By now she was used to Beast Boy using the shortened pet form, but still corrected him out of habit and in an effort to maintain appearances—she had her dignity to protect, after all. "I'm fine," the young woman replied, not wanting to tell anyone that she had been sleepless through most of the night.

Raven proceeded to dress herself and after taking a couple minutes to wake up a little and collect herself, she started to leave her room. But as she opened the door, she found her green friend was waiting for her. "What do you want, Gar?" she asked.

Beast Boy didn't have the mechanical ingenuity which Cyborg long thrived on, nor the detective skills that made Robin the Boy Wonder, and he certainly was no empath. However, he also wasn't as stupid as he seemed, and he was surprisingly strong in the area of emotional intelligence. Between his inhumanly strong hearing abilities and his vast EI, the changeling was able to tell from Raven's voice alone that she was under some form of stress (most likely related to the day's move). So he chose to wait for the empath in the hallway, with the intention of continuing his endless mission of trying to keep his friends happy.

"I was just wondering if there was anything you needed to talk about," the changeling stated honestly, "I was also wondering what your mailing address and phone number are gonna be. Me and Cy kinda wanna keep in touch with everyone and you're the only one we're not going to have any contact info for." Beast Boy had (seemingly) unwittingly given her an open door into exactly the subject she wanted to talk about.

"Actually, about that," she frowned as she paused, "can I talk to you in private for a minute?" Beast Boy immediately shot her a look of concern as she gestured for him to join her in her room; although, over the years, all of the Titans (as well as Jinx—who was one of the H.I.V.E. Five at the time—and a number of sladebots) had been in her room at least once, but she was normally still quite insistent that non one should _ever_ go in her room. For her to invite _him_ into her room was very unusual, and he could quickly deduce from the gesture that something was indeed wrong.

"Uh, okay," the green Titan said with a trace of nervousness in his voice. "You know that I'm always here if you need to talk about anything—even if its just to vent," his fang was exposed in one of his trademark disarming smiles as he finished the latter part.

'_How do I say this?'_ the violet-haired woman thought as the door closed. "About my contact info," she sat on her bed as she continued, "I... I haven't really found any place where I could go, and I couldn't find a job..." She cupped her head in her hands as she said it, feeling a combination of embarrassment and despair while trying to muster the bravery to ask the question she wanted to ask. Thankfully, her green friend cut her off and rendered her question moot.

"Why didn't you tell me?" the now-financially-comfortable changeling begged. "The Titans are family, and I'd do anything for any of you. You do know you can always come stay with me and Cy, right? I've got a big house, there's plenty of room." In reality, he was somewhat offended that she hadn't come to him and asked for his help, although he didn't let it show. He could only think of two reasons why she wouldn't have asked: either she thought he'd turn her down, or she wanted him out of her life. The former bewildered him, as he felt she should know by now that he would never do that to her. The latter possibility, that she would rather be homeless than be near him, hurt him deeply. But in this moment it was her troubles that mattered, so he chose to stow his emotional reactions.

"I don't want to be a burden," she confirmed that it was the former possibility that was the case. "I've always tried to be self-sufficient! I don't want to be dead weight," she stated, as some very uncharacteristic tears began to roll down her cheeks. This was certainly one of those moments when she was glad her hood was up.

"Rae-ven," he corrected himself in mid-word, while taking a seat beside her, "do you know how many times you've saved my life? And on top of that, you helped me feel better after that whole thing with the Beast. And let's not forget about the time when I was homeless and you decided to give me a roof over my head, even though you didn't have to!" He cautiously brought her into a chaste embrace while continuing, "you wouldn't be a burden—you've already paid your rent in full for the next... well, eternity." He shot her a reassuring smile.

She knew he wasn't promising something he couldn't deliver when he said that. While his past was still largely an enigma to everyone in the Titan family, it was well-known among the Titans that not only did Beast Boy have the small fortune left behind for him by his biological parents, but he was also the sole heir to the Dayton fortune as well—and, seeing as Steve Dayton was the fifth richest man in the world, it was safe to say Garfield would never be poor. She also knew that, deep in is heart, he would never abandon a friend, especially a very dear one like Cyborg or herself. She realized she should have known all along that she had nothing to worry about, but she also determined that she should not abuse his kindness.

"Thank you, Gar; you have no idea how much this means to me." She stood up and faced him as she finished her statement of appreciation. "But," she added as her voice returned to its more typical monotone, "as soon as I find a job, things _will_ change. I don't care how much you think you might owe me, I am _not_ going to become a freeloader."

"Dude! The day I think you're a freeloader will be the day Big Red gets an NHL franchise!" Beast Boy protested. "Seriously, if you want to pay rent eventually, you can, but don't even worry about that right now. All I care about is that you're not gonna be living out in the cold. I've been there, it sucks." He once again flashed a friendly grin. "I guess we should probably go fill Cy in about the change in plans," the shape-shifter noted while getting up to walk to the door.

"Okay, since I'm going to be going with you and Cyborg, I kind of have a question," the empath said as she and her green friend began to traverse the hallways. "What about my things? You two weren't anticipating that I would be coming with, so is there going to be enough room?"

"There should be," the green man replied, "this one time when I went to Steel City with Cy, we ended up saving this trucker on the way back who was being attacked by a bunch of thugs. He was so grateful that he promised to help us whenever we needed to move anything—well, as long as we gave him enough notice at least." Beast Boy's smile brightened. "Dude's got an eighteen wheeler! Even between all of my stuff and all of Cy's stuff, it's only gonna be half full. We shouldn't have any problem with fitting your stuff in."

The dark Titan's lip curled into an almost imperceptible smile. _'Well, that problem's solved,'_ she thought to herself as she and her green friend embarked the elevator in their journey to find Cyborg. Of course, that would be a short endeavor, as the cybernetic twenty-something was pretty much where he could usually be found during the day when he wasn't either playing video games, eating, or kicking villains' butts: the garage.

The T-Car had always been Cyborg's baby (as he himself affectionately called it). When the decision to disband the team was made, the Titans decided to leave all of the immovable property on the island to the city. Vehicles were not, however, included in that deal. An agreement was made that Robin and Starfire would take the Space T-Ship, while Cyborg would keep the T-Car. The Sub T-Ship and the Jet T-Ship would be held in common by Beast Boy, Cyborg and Raven. Of course, the R-Cycle remained Robin's, and was entrusted to the care of Bruce Wayne for storage until it could be shipped to Tamaran. Knowing that he and Beast Boy would be leaving for LA in a matter of hours, Cyborg was of course readying his baby for the trip.

Before the chromatically-challenged Titans could even announce their presence in the room, Cyborg spoke to them. "So, Rae's coming with, huh?" Beast Boy and Raven were both taken very much aback by his correct guess, but they could only figure he was about to tease them about their supposed mutual attraction for each other. They were saved from the embarrassment, however, as their communicators came to life a microsecond after Cyborg opened his mouth to answer their unspoken question.

"All Titans report to the Main Ops Room," Robin's voice commanded. On a normal day, the trio would have wondered what this was about, but there was really no surprise in it today. The three made their way to the designated destination without a word; Cyborg's teasing would have to wait for another opportunity.

"Hey guys, take a seat," Robin said as the three entered the room. Raven, Beast Boy and Cyborg wasted no time in complying, the changeling taking his seat between the dark empath and their half-mechanical friend. Starfire remained standing at their leader's side, smiling in a manner that could illuminate the darkest night.

"As you know, today is our last day as a team," the leader began, "but we've always been more than _just_ a team, and, as your leader, I want to tell each of you how much I have appreciated working with you through the years." The Boy Wonder was being uncharacteristically sentimental. He faced his Tamaranean significant other "Star, I can't find the words to accurately how I feel about having fought by your side all these years. From the moment you first kissed me on that day you escaped the Gordonians, to this very moment, you have always had such a big effect on me. I love you, and I anxiously await our life together on Tamaran. I am certain you will be one of the greatest queens in Tamaran's ever had, and I'll be there for you the entire time." He concluded his words to his girlfriend with a short kiss.

"Boyfriend Robin, you make me the happiest woman in the Universe," Starfire replied. She was finding it difficult to keep her feet on the floor as she grasped her future consort in a hug which could have crushed an elephant's ribs. To say that the alien princess was elated would be a supreme understatement. As the Tamaranean released the Boy Wonder from her bone-crushing embrace, he turned his face to the green changeling.

"Beast Boy—or should I say Garfield?—I think we all owe you a bit of gratitude," Robin said, after catching his breath. "Between your unfaltering loyalty to the team, your self-appointed mission to keep all of us from going over the dark side, and the surprisingly great leadership capabilities you displayed when we fought the Brotherhood of Evil, you've always been an irreplaceable member of this team. Not only could we not have been as successful without you as we were, the team itself probably wouldn't exist; it was you, after all, who tried the hardest to get us all to form a team when our paths crossed those years ago. I never really showed you my gratitude—indeed, sometimes I was rather hard on you—but I want you to know I'm sorry for that and you've always been a great teammate and I'll always consider you my friend and brother."

Beast Boy gave a slight smile before giving his reply, "don't worry about Rob. I'm sure you guys would've ended up getting together without me anyway, and the Brotherhood was just an enemy I had a lot of experience with because of my past in the Doom Patrol. And I already forgave you a long time ago for all the times you din't exactly give me the best treatment... I mean, I understand why you were that way most of the time, and you always meant the best by it. And, you know, it's like ancient history and all, but you _were_ the _one_ person who took the time to comfort me the first time Terra left," the changeling shrugged and his smile grew into his trademark grin. "But...if you want to make up for all the times you've been a hardass to me, just remember to make sure the rest of us can all attend your wedding."

Robin gave a short chuckle, his arm draped over his fiancée's shoulder. "Don't worry, you'll all be invited to the wedding and we'll provide transportation. But don't expect it to be anytime soon; we're probably going to be _very_ busy for a while," Grayson noted. "First we'll have to take some time to get Star's reign established, then we're going to have to return to Earth to attend Bruce's wedding..." at that point he was cut off by the changeling.

"Dude, talk about an odd c...ow!" Beast Boy was unable to comment any further on the oddity of Batman's choice of spouse, as Cyborg jabbed an elbow into his rib in an unspoken signal to 'shut the hell up.' No one in the Tower was completely sure of Robin's feelings about the Dark Knight's impending marriage, including the Boy Wonder himself. It was probably best to stop Beast Boy before he had an opportunity to make a joke about it. Robin, on the other hand, simply gave the changeling a look which kind of said 'tell me about it.'

With the changeling's interruption out of the way, Robin continued with what he was saying, "after Bruce's wedding, we'll be setting out to try to locate and retrieve Star's brother, since she (understandably) wants him to be in attendance at our wedding. On top of all of that, we're also going to have to be constantly looking over our shoulders in case Blackfire should decide to return." Robin sighed and concluded that "it'll probably be a year before we get married, at the earliest. But it's going to be one _long_ year."

"Anyway," the masked man ended the digression and turned his attention to Raven, "Raven, I still think of you as being something like a manifestation of hope. I mean, you beat your destiny...you defeated your father and proved, in spite of everything you've ever been told about your life, that you decide your course. I will always regard you as one of my closest friends." Turning his attention to his half-robotic second-in-command, he continued, "you too Cyborg. Just like I feel that we never would have been a team in the first place without Beast Boy's overwhelming desire to make new friends, our team would have never been anywhere near as successful as we were if it wasn't for your technical and medical skills."

Speaking to all of his team, he finally concluded, "four years is a long time. But they were productive years, with good friends, doing things that made a difference. And, you know, every single one of you—no, every single one of _us_—had an integral part in that. We may have all gotten on each other's nerves from time to time, but we were always a family. Working with you has taught me the value of that; when we first met each other, I was so damn fixated on working alone. But we were always stronger working together—not just from the summation of our separate and individual strengths, but also because we were there for each other between the battles, at all times, for better or for worse. If even one of us chose not to join this team, I'm fairly confident we would all be dead by now."

Starfire took the floor as her beloved finished his words of appreciation for their team. "Every word Boyfriend Robin said applies as well to my feelings," she began to cry. "And though I a filled with much of the joy that I will be returning to Tamaran with him at my side, I worry too that I might lose contact with you, the rest of my dearest friends."

"Don't worry Star," Cyborg replied to the Tamaranean's concerns. "It shouldn't be very hard for us to all stay in contact, especially since Rae, BB and I are all going to be in one place for a while, and you and Rob are also going to be together in one place. If the Justice League is willing to help us out, we might even be able to use the Watchtower to relay signals from our communicators and be able to contact each other individually."

"I'll have to ask them about that," Robin responded. "Most of the JLA's big-wigs will be at Bruce's wedding, so I figure then may be as good a time as ever." Robin then checked the time on his communicator. "Unfortunately, we'll have to wait a while before we'll be able to talk about that. It's getting to be about time for Star and I to get going."

Cyborg, Raven and Beast Boy accompanied their friends as they embarked the Space T-Ship, saying their emotional farewells in the last moments. As the three watched their teammates launch into space, Beast Boy raised a couple important questions.

"It's like 1:30," the changeling noted. "When's the truck gonna be here? And how are we possibly going to have time to load all our stuff?"

"Well," Raven could feel Beast Boy's nervous emotions, and decided to calm him a bit, "I could always just teleport everything into the trailer. It should only take a couple minutes to get your, my and Cyborg's things all into the truck that way, so we can probably leave within ten minutes or so of the truck getting here."

As Raven was answering one of Beast Boy's worries, Cyborg noticed the answer to his previous question. "As for the truck," the metal man pointed toward the city, "it's right there." Sure enough, the eighteen wheeler was parking near the secret entrance on the mainland side of the tunnel connecting the Tower's garage to the city. Within a few moments, Raven was able to teleport the belongings of all three Titans into the trailer, and the friends were ready to go.

"I call shotgun!" the green man-child shouted. Raven didn't have any problem with this whatsoever, as she wanted to rest a bit on the long drive to Los Angeles, and figured it would probably be easier to take a nap in the back seat. Soon enough, the T-Car was on the freeway, leaving Jump City behind with the truck carrying the Titans' property in tow. For the most part, the trip was unremarkable until the T-Car got out of range of Jump City's radio stations. Searching for something to listen to, Beast Boy inadvertently stumbled upon a public radio news station, but the story they were broadcasting at the moment made his heart skip a beat.

Upon hearing the words "...ilitary coup overthrew the democratically-elected government of Lamumba," the shape-shifter froze the dial, not even listening as Cyborg (who had no idea why his green friend would be so interested in a military coup in a small African country most people had never even heard of) protested the choice of radio channels. Listening intently, the facts that he learned in the radio reports captured his full and undivided attention: the coup was launched the previous night, and the country's President was murdered. More importantly, from where Beast Boy's concerns lied, King Tawaba of the subnational Kingdom of Upper Lamumba had very publicly lodged his complaints that the coup was illegal and clearly stated that Upper Lamumba would not cooperate with the illegitimate military regime now in control of the country's central government. A _very_ bad feeling took root at the pit of Beast Boy's stomach.

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**Author's ****Notes  
**I've borrowed some continuity from GuardianSaiyoko's _Whitewater_ shorts (specifically, I borrowed the part about Raven having taken a homeless Beast Boy in as a roommate while the Tower was being constructed from the story "Refuge" and its sequels). I feel it's helpful to establish the "affection and loyalty" end of the BBRae 'Old Married Couple' dynamic early on, to confirm that, through everything and despite all of the apparent antagonism, they're always very close friends, who always have each other's backs. I also made mentions of the Nevermore incident and references to the new dynamic of life in the Tower after Robin and Starfire got together to establish Raven, Beast Boy and Cyborg as a close (and almost codependent) trio.

Don't worry about how soft this chapter might be. There will be some level of danger and adventure ahead. The story's primary Big Bad will probably be revealed in a few chapters, although there will be more than a few hints of where it's going.

In case anyone is wondering about Cyborg's career in this fic: in the DC Universe, S.T.A.R. Labs' facility in LA deals with genetics and disease control. I realize that mechanics or robotics would probably have been Cyborg's strongest point, but one has to admit that dealing with Beast Boy's health needs in and of itself has given him more than enough experience for this field, not to mention having to take care of an alien and a human/demon hybrid on top of it. I don't want to spoil things, but this will also be important to the plot ahead.

Also, if anyone (especially Raven) seems OOC, you've got to remember that this isn't a normal circumstance. She is especially under quite a lot of stress at the beginning of the chapter, and the prospect of potentially ending up homeless will tend to affect a person. I also figured that Beast Boy having a fairly good soft skill EQ (when he chooses to use it) should be well within his character, especially when you add some of his personality from the comics into the mix. Moreover, it should be kept in mind that I'm writing a Gar who is now a legal adult, and who has matured a fair amount over the interceding years (even if he still has a very active inner child).

_**Annatheavidreader-**_ I'm glad that you like it so far. I agree that Raven would definitely have the shortest stick in this situation, and even if I were to include her siblings in the story, I don't think she'd be particularly willing to join them. I figure that, while you're correct that Gar could always go back to the Doom Patrol, he wouldn't particularly want to deal with the conflict with Steve, so returning to the Doom Patrol on a permanent basis would strike me as an option of last resort for him. Thankfully, Gar has his inheritance from Mark and Marie, so he can be comfortable (for a while at least) without having to rejoin the Doom Patrol; albeit I don't see him going long without at least visiting Steve and Rita—they still are his adoptive parents and there is still mutual love between them as such. As for a rationalization of why the team is disbanding rather than merely relocating: I figure that the Brotherhood had a global network of villains under its command, so freezing them would have had a universal effect. Also, I figure that with the Titans' defeat of the Brotherhood _and_ the formation of a global network of Titans, there would be a chilling effect among the remaining villains, with only the most insane, stupidest or strongest of them wanting to even contemplate facing the them. Since all of the remaining DC Universe villains who are actually formidable are already engaged by other heroes (Joker vs. Batman, Lex Luthor vs. Superman, etc.), there's really no one left for them to fight (or so it would seem). Of course, there's always more to things than they appear ;)

_**Dynamite403**_ & _**I Tear Paper For Fun-**_ Thank you for your feedback. I'm glad to see that reviewers at least liked the Prologue. I hope the rest of the story doesn't disappoint.

* * *

**Stay Tuned  
**What's Rage's big secret and why can't she hate Beast Boy? Who's Batman going to marry, and does it have anything to do with the main plot? What the hell is going on in Lamumba, and what is Beast Boy gonna do about it? What does the Beast have to do with everything? How will the 'villainy drought' affect the other Titan teams? Stay tuned for the answers to all of these questions (and more)!


	3. Chapter II: Breakfast & a Troubled Mind

**Disclaimer:** Teen Titans is the property of DC Comics. I own neither.

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**Ascension of the Beast**

**Chapter II**

**Breakfast and a Troubled Mind**

"...but they could actually be in love with each other. Just because she's got a history on the wrong side doesn't mean she's evil now. Just because her father...well...doesn't mean she's evil either. I mean, look at me—I'm a demon's spawn! If I can be redeemed, so can anyone else, including her," Raven stated while entering the dining room with a cup of herbal tea in her hand. She was never quite drawn to gossip—in fact, she normally despised it—but this topic was too juicy for even her to ignore, and Cyborg was easily able to reel her into it. "Besides, she's beautiful, he's handsome, they have comparable intellects, they share common interests and strengths, and even if they don't really love each other, their relationship will encourage peace and moderation."

"I don't know," the cybernetic twenty-something replied. "I still have to worry if they've got him under some kind of mind control or something. It's just too weird," he added, before abruptly changing the subject. "By the way, when was the last time you saw B?" he asked while scratching his head, a concerned look pasted on his face.

It had been two weeks since the trio had arrived in Los Angeles, and Cyborg and Raven had seen their verdant landlord for a combined total of about fifteen minutes since the day after they moved in. Beast Boy had taken on the unusual habit of spending nearly all of his time in his father's old study. His friends only occasioned to catch a glimpse of him when he needed to use the restroom, or went to the kitchen to grab a plate of tofu. They were beginning to wonder whether he was sleeping in the study, or just not sleeping at all; his bed had not been used once since they moved in, and, alarmingly enough, his bedroom was spotless.

"I saw him getting something to eat on Tuesday," Raven replied. The day on which this particular conversation was taking place was a Friday. "Why? When was the last time you saw him?" she asked, becoming a little concerned herself since Cyborg's question made her realize how long it had been since she'd seen him. The house was large as far as houses go; treading along the borderline between being a particularly large house or a particularly small mansion. However, it was still small enough that they should have seen him several times a day if he was acting normal.

"I haven't seen the grass stain since...Saturday, I think," Cyborg replied, having to think hard to remember the last time he'd seen his best friend. "Something's wrong here, Rae. Whatever's going on, it ain't healthy!"

"I know what you mean," the empath replied. "He's starting to remind me of Dick," she said, referring to Robin's obsession with Slade, which manifested itself in a plethora of unhealthy ways years ago. "And I keep picking up an odd mix of emotions from him, too. Like a combination of guilt, grief, nostalgia, terror, and a few emotions I haven't even been able to identify. And he's broadcasting them _loud_," she grumbled a bit as she added the last part. Beast Boy was usually somewhat inert when it came to the emotions she empathically sensed from him, but now it was as if the floodgates had opened. Although she had been used to sensing the emotions of others for her entire life, this was actually starting to give her a migraine.

"Great," Cyborg said with more than a hint of sarcasm. Letting out a frustrated sigh, he pondered, "I wonder why he's so obsessed with this whole Lamumba thing. I mean, he's never said anything about ever having gone to Africa, but he's acting like the place is his homeland or something."

"You never know," replied the empath, "we don't really know _anything_ about his life before he joined the Doom Patrol. Come to think of it, he's pretty much been even more secretive about his past than Dick, or even me. But he's never really struck me as the kind of person who's really been out in the world—aside from work. I don't know what to think right now, actually." She thought to herself for a moment as she sipped her tea, and then noted "it seems like every time any one of us has ever tried to get him into a position to talk about his past, he's always changed the subject."

"Well, B's good at that," Cyborg noted after swallowing the last of the bacon that was on his plate, "somehow he has that ability to change the subject without you even realizing it at the time. Sometimes I swear the stupidest things that come out of his mouth are things he's intentionally saying to throw us off the trail of _something_, and if that doesn't work he always resorts to doing or saying something annoying."

Raven thought for a moment, letting what her cybernetic friend was saying sink in. "You know, sometimes I think he's blocking his emotions; especially when he realizes I'm around."

"That wouldn't really surprise me, Rave," Cyborg knew enough of his best friend's time with the Doom Patrol to be able to put two and two together on that one. "Living under the same roof with Mento, I would think he'd figured out some sort of way to keep parts of his mind from being read."

Just then, Cyborg's cell phone rang. "Yes, sir...okay...I'll be on my way soon...noon tomorrow?...okay, bye." The half-robotic man thought for a moment and then decided to ask Raven a question. "Hey Rae, do you think you could do me a favor?"

"That would depend," the nearly-nineteen-year old empath replied with an inquisitive look on her face, "what do you want?"

"Do you think you could try to get B out of that damn study and maybe out of the house once in a while today and during the weekend?" He knew asking her this question was a crap shoot which depended entirely upon what mood she was in.

"Why can't you do that yourself?" It's not that she didn't care about Beast Boy. In fact, she cared about him a lot; so much, in fact, that she wished to protect him from the danger of her throwing him into an anoxic dimension for annoying her too much. Also, she had no idea what would actually interest him enough to tear him away from his obsession with Lamumba without subjecting herself to torture.

"Eh, that call I just got was from work," he nervously scratched his head as he paused for a moment. "Turns out the WHO is contracting S.T.A.R. Labs to work on developing a vaccine for some tropical illness that kills everyone who gets it. Apparently, the big-wigs figure it's impossible, so it got delegated down to the new guy," he chuckled a little at his situation. "Anyway, they need me to jump on a plane to New York, and between work and other things, I probably won't be back until Monday night."

"_Other things_, huh?" the empath said with a mischievous, albeit barely visible, smirk on her face. "Those _other things_ wouldn't happen to include a blonde who may or may not happen to have an alliterated name, would they?" She was in a rare mood to tease him, and she knew well of his female friend in the Big Apple. Ever since Bumblebee and Herald got together, the New Yorker was now the only remaining single female in whom Cyborg had an overt romantic interest.

Cyborg, however, chose to diffuse the teasing. "Actually, that's the exact reason I'm not coming back on Sunday," he said with a grin the size of a half moon. As he got up from his seat, his face turned serious again. "Just, please Rae, remember to get B out of that study for a while. I'm startin' to worry we might permanently lose the green bean we know and love if this keeps up for too long," he said as he made his exit.

"And that would be a bad thing, how?" she asked no one in particular. She decided it would probably be best if she meditated for a while before approaching Beast Boy. She had actually been enjoying a fairly stress-free existence living in the Logan house so far, to the point where she actually relaxed her early determination to find work—it helped that, as soon as they got to LA, Beast Boy reminded her again that there was no pressure, and his voice in that moment actually made her suspect that he felt he needed her around even more than she needed the home. To know that she was serving some purpose, and was helping someone, was always something that made her feel good. Perhaps there was still some lingering need to prove to herself that she had indeed risen above the purpose for which she was originally sired and defined her life by her self-appointed mission to have a positive impact instead.

Nevertheless, this was Beast Boy. For as long as she had known him, his impact on her was never anything other than _huge_. When he annoyed her, he _really_ pissed her off. On the other hand, when he made her happy, he usually made her happier than anyone else was able to. There was no moderation to it—regardless of _what_ emotion the changeling made her feel, he always made her feel it with an inestimable strength. If she was going to spend her day trying to draw him out of his obsession with Lamumba, she needed to know for absolute certain that she had her emotions under control.

* * *

When Beast Boy, Cyborg and Raven arrived at the Logan house, the study looked like an orderly home office. After two weeks of the changeling's Lamumba obsession, however, the room's appearance changed to a form which was nothing like its previous one. With the passing of every hour, it was looking less like a home office and increasingly more resembling John Nash's room from _A Beautiful Mind_. Every inch of space on the desk was covered with books and documents, and every inch of wall space was covered with papers and photographs. Well, every inch of the wall except for the spot where he had mounted a flat-screen television, which was now constantly playing CNN.

Although it was certainly bringing his mental health to the brink of the abyss, this condition was not in itself caused by any sort of mental health problem. Beast Boy's obsession with Lamumba was personal and professional, founded upon a mix of instinct, emotion and intellect. Lamumba was a special case for him, and retired or not, he was still a hero. He could not allow himself to fail the people of Lamumba, as he had failed his parents before; but with the victory over the Brotherhood of Evil now years behind him, he knew now that he had the capacity to defeat evil. He was not stupid, even if he didn't presently know _how_ he would save Lamumba. He didn't know the end game yet, but his instincts told him enough that he now knew he must collect and digest all pertinent information on the situation, in order to prepare himself to form a plan.

The leader of the coup was a career military officer by the name of General Mwenye Kibwana. In the first few hours, soldiers under his command murdered the country's President, Sefu Mtwa, and proceeded to dissolve the Parliament by force of arms. Although Prime Minister Zuberi Kiongozi was saved from sharing the President's fate by the fact that he was on a state visit to Zambesi at the time, it was exceedingly clear that he could not return to his country—a point which was very strongly driven home when the Kibwana regime threatened to invade Zambesi if Kiongozi was permitted any further safe haven there. Within hours after the threat was issued, Kiongozi was granted asylum in the United States, where he began working to form a government-in-exile.

Perhaps the oddest thing about the coup was the absence of foreign state sponsors. None of the world's major powers were particularly pleased with the coup, and two weeks into Kibwana's reign over the central government, no country had yet recognized his regime as the legitimate government of Lamumba. Beast Boy dug deep into all of the background information he could find about General Kibwana. While the General had a unique political philosophy, Garfield's instincts somehow told him that _someone_ had to be backing Kibwana, but his intellect knew that whomever it was, they were not a _state_.

The thing which most disturbed the changeling, however, was the new regime's propensity for the use of political violence. Within a day after taking power, General Kibwana issued an edict dissolving all existing political parties. Within an hour of the declaration, the parties' headquarters were raided by the military. As a warning to the other political groups, an army captain summarily executed the leader of the country's Communist Party with a simple—and very public—gunshot to the head. As more time went by over the interceding two weeks, people who opposed the regime began to either "disappear" or end up being the victims of similar summary executions. While the bodies of the people who "disappeared" had yet to turn up, it was presumed that most of these people—who for one reason or another could not be overtly murdered—had been secretly killed.

By the end of the first week, Garfield was _very_ worried for the safety of King Tawaba and his sons in particular. Tawaba never backed down in his opposition to the regime, which Gar knew would make the King a target for the regime's violent repression—especially considering the fact that Tawaba's refusal to accept the regime left the country on the brink of civil war. On Tuesday, Beast Boy's fears were ultimately realized when it was reported that the King and his family had gone missing.

The changeling was beginning to realize he might be a little too immersed in this for his own good, but at the same time, he couldn't seem to tear himself away from his obsession on his own. At this point, he didn't even know what day it was anymore, until one of the hosts on a CNN show noted it. So immersed was he in the matter that, although his animal DNA had left him with the strongest senses of all the former Titans, and the knock was more than loud enough that a normal person should have been able to hear it, he didn't hear a thing when Raven knocked on the door. Luckily for Beast Boy's sanity, she was not in a position nor mood to allow the lack of a response to stop her.

The empath opened the door, half expecting her friend to be passed out from sleep deprivation or malnutrition, but she quickly found that he was very much conscious. "Gar," she said trying to get his attention; he gave not the slightest indication of having heard her. "Beast Boy," she said a little louder while walking toward the desk, but to the same effect. "Garfield!" she shouted as she began to shake him. He initially jumped in shock, but quickly realized it was his empathic friend who was in the room with him.

"Oh, hey Rae!" the changeling finally responded. "What's up?" he asked, knowing that Raven wasn't one to interrupt people's activities without an important reason of some sort. Frankly, this was not an exception—seeing Beast Boy like this scared the crap out of her.

She decided honesty would probably be the best policy. "Vic and I were worrying about you," she said with her hand still on his shoulder. "I wanted to see if, maybe, you wanted to watch a movie, or spend some time out of the house for a while?" Garfield carefully considered what she had asked him; he was aware that what he was doing wasn't really healthy, and maybe it would do him some good to get his mind off from everything for a while. He was also keenly aware that Raven wouldn't be doing this unless she really was worried about him.

"I guess," he said with a hint of hesitation in his voice. While he consciously knew that he needed to get away from his obsession with Lamumba for a while, he still felt bad about the prospect of spending time on recreation. He smelled himself and paused for a moment. "But maybe I should take a shower first."

* * *

**Author'****s**** Notes  
**This chapter is still kinda slow and considerably shorter than the preceding chapter, but I hope it's steadily building up the plot.

The second half of this chapter starts to tread into some dark territory, but it won't be the darkest chapter by any measure. The next chapter will be much lighter, though, as Beast Boy and Raven spend a weekend with each other in the LA area.

I've established that Beast Boy's instincts are telling him that there's some sort of "power behind the throne" in the Kibwana regime, but whether such a shadow influence actually exists and who it is are still open questions. We can confirm that it's a non-state actor, though.

_**Annatheavidreader-**_ Although I really do not want to spoil the plot right now, I will confirm that at least one (perhaps more) of your guesses are right on the money. I don't really want to identify which those might be, or the quantity of correct guesses, though. I agree about the characters maturing over time; no one really stays the same. I really like what Bruce Lee said about how there's really no such thing as maturity, but rather an "ever-evolving process of maturing" that carries on until the day the person dies, and I hope that the characters in my story will kind of exhibit that ever-evolving process. If there's a sequel (I'm actually considering multiple sequels, depending on how this story goes), that process will be even more pronounced in the overall series of stories.

* * *

**Stay**** Tuned  
**Is there a power in the shadows sponsoring the Kibwana regime, and if so, who is it? Will Beast Boy's past be revealed, or will he lose his sanity first? What happened to King Tawaba and his family? Stay tuned for the answers to all these questions (and more)!


	4. Chapter III: Lost in LA

**Disclaimer:** Sorry, I don't own the Teen Titans.

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**Ascension of the Beast**

**Chapter III**

**Lost in LA**

"Idiot," Raven said, just before letting out a sigh of slight frustration. "Why did I let you drive?" Beast Boy could only give her a nervous grin in return. "Only you could end up in Watts while trying to get to Anaheim," Raven's monotone did not express any emotion behind her words.

In all honesty, she didn't really want to go to their intended destination anyway. She had only agreed to go to Disneyland because she thought it would be something that Beast Boy would enjoy, and her ultimate objective at the moment was to keep his mind off from a certain African country. In a way, she was kind of relieved that he had gotten them lost—she really didn't want to have to deal with being harassed by giant mice and ducks.

Raven was actually enjoying the ride to a degree. Garfield had been an actor, and as such had at least some familiarity with the LA area. But Raven was almost like a tourist here. This ride, which had taken the duo through most of Los Angeles County, was helping to familiarize her with her new surroundings. Besides, the LA area had quite a lot of beautiful sights. As their car neared the Watts Towers, Raven found herself, for reasons unknown even to her, drawn to the Towers' aesthetic.

Beast Boy noticed through his enhanced peripheral vision as the landmark captured Raven's gaze. In all honesty, getting "lost" was no accident. The changeling knew that his demonic friend would never enjoy herself at Disneyland, and instead chose to take her for a ride through the entire LA Metro Area just to see what kind of things would draw her attention. "Wanna take a closer look?" he asked, with a friendly smirk on his face. She simply nodded as he began searching for a suitable place to park.

As the two approached the landmark, Raven finally noticed what materials comprised the Towers' construction. "So, it's made of garbage?" she mused upon the rhetorical question. "Reminds me of your old room at the Tower."

"Ha-ha," the changeling replied sarcastically. He thought for a moment and began to recall what he had heard about the landmark's origins. "The dude who built this spent like thirty years of his life working on it. He didn't really have any sort of plan, and he just kinda used things that other people had thrown away or abandoned to build it." He paused for a moment to gauge her reaction; she seemed to be listening. "After he left, the city wanted to tear it down, but I guess there was an uproar and they decided to give it a stress test in the hope of being able to condemn it for being unsound. They set up a crane and pulled at it laterally, hoping to find its fail point; it never buckled or even shifted. Actually, the _crane_ ended up falling apart, if I remember the story right."

Raven looked at the young man with no small level of surprise. She had known he wasn't as stupid as he tended to act, but she always thought of him as being uneducated. This trivial story he had told her challenged her view of him in that regard. "How did you know all of that?" she asked, honestly surprised that he would know so much about the historic landmark.

He just shrugged, and proceeded to ignore the question. "I think the story adds to its beauty. I mean, here this entire landmark is made out of stuff that no one wanted anymore, but it was all re-purposed into this great work of art. It kinda shows that sometimes your assumptions about things can be totally wrong; I mean, everyone thought this was all junk until the guy put it all together, and now it's a recognized national, state and city landmark." He shuttered a little while inhaling before he finally concluded his remarks about the landmark, "it kind of reminds me of us, you know?"

Raven understood what he was saying. When the Titans first got together, they had all either been rejected or pushed away from their former homes. Cyborg was treated as an object of terror by those around him because of his robotic features. Starfire escaped Gordanian slavery, and would never have been a slave to begin with if it wasn't for her sister selling her. Raven herself had always been ostracized by the people of her home dimension because they feared her demonic powers. Robin was the only "normal" in the group, but Batman pushed him away by treating him like a kid. Beast Boy, though...

Raven knew so little of Beast Boy's past that she could never be certain of much on subjects like this. She knew that he had left the Doom Patrol because Mento was a bit too much of a hard-ass and placed the parameters of the mission above even the survival of his team—traits she and the other Titans witnessed first hand when they helped the Doom Patrol in the action that ended up inaugurating the global war between the Titans and the Brotherhood of Evil. Beyond that, she could also guess that he was probably rejected by society because of his green skin color (until he became a famous actor/superhero, at least). Other than that, she knew nothing about his past, and the unsated curiosity was really bugging her.

"So, what do you want to do now?" Beast Boy asked her, jerking her out of her thoughts. "If we tried to go to Anaheim now, Disneyland would probably be closed by the time we got there," he noted, while looking at his watch.

"It doesn't matter to me," she answered. Honestly, the excursion left her somewhat tired and she'd prefer to go home. But she was still had the mission Cyborg had assigned her to take care of, and unless she and Beast Boy did something entertaining, returning home would probably result in him returning to the study for another week.

"Well," the changeling said before pausing to think. "Wicked Scary IV's on pay-per-view. We could go back to the house and watch it. If you're not too scared," he implicitly teased her about the time the team first watched the original Wicked Scary—that was an interesting night, as her repressed fear unleashed a nightmare that was so powerful, it infected the consciousnesses of the other Titans as well.

"Sure," the empath began her reply, "under the condition that you never bring that up again." It was a somewhat embarrassing incident for her. She'd always been trained to control her emotions, but what she was doing that night was denial, not control. To be controlled, the fear needed to be addressed; but, until the nightmare forced her to accept it, she denied that it even existed.

As the two got back in the car, Raven thought about denial and trauma and the unhealthy consequences thereof. Of course, not everyone had demonic powers which could literally bring their nightmares to life if they didn't accept their emotions. Nevertheless, she figured that, in order to cope with something, a person had to accept it. She wondered if this was what Beast Boy was doing. She really couldn't fathom that someone with as carefree a sense of humor as his could really have that horrible of a past, but there had to be a reason why he would never talk about it.

In that moment, she decided that she would try as hard as she could to get him to reveal to her what he was hiding. 'Besides, it couldn't be half as bad as what I saw in Dick's memories,' she thought to herself.

* * *

**Author's Notes**  
This is a rather short chapter and it really doesn't go into much other than developing the relationship between Beast Boy and Raven a bit. I figured it would be necessary for the future of the story for Raven to begin seeing a deeper side to Beast Boy.

_**Annatheavidreader-**_I figure I owe a response to reviewers who write their reviews in as much depth as you've been doing. Also, I don't want to spoil too much, but I figure I can say that Sakutia is going to be important to how the plot of this story unfolds in later chapters.

* * *

**Stay**** Tuned**  
What will happen when Raven asks Beast Boy about his past? Will she have bitten off more than she can chew? Stay tuned for the answers to these questions (and more).


	5. Chapter IV: Misso Eius

**Disclaimer:** I do not own, nor have I ever owned, the Teen Titans.

* * *

**Ascension of the Beast**

**Chapter IV**

**Misso Eius**

Although they were already nearing the climax of the movie, if you were to give Raven a pop quiz on what had happened so far, she'd probably fail. Her curiosity was still piqued and she was beginning to obsess about what he hadn't told her. _'H-he doesn't trust us,'_ a sniffling Timid suggested a possibly as to why the changeling hadn't disclosed anything to her the empath about his past. It was especially annoying since Timid had been in a paranoid mood the whole time, and each of the other emoticlones were suggesting their own explanations for why he didn't want to talk about it.

Regardless of the purpose for his refusal to talk about his past, which she herself suspected might be the result of denial, she was beginning to work up the courage to try to break through. She just needed to figure out how to bring it up. Outright demanding to know about his past might seem a little too intrusive and domineering, so some amount of tact might be useful. She knew she had to avoid allowing him to change the subject, so she had to focus on this subject. She would also have to use her empathy to detect when something she said provoked a defensive response, and attempt to deal with any such defensiveness. Thinking of all of these things was beginning to make her doubt her need to know, but Wisdom reminded her of the potential importance and Brave was working as hard as she could to keep her from backing off.

As the credits began to roll, she took an inventory of the changeling's posture; he seemed pretty relaxed and was certainly the happiest she had seen him since they arrived in Los Angeles two weeks before. This gave Brave a bit of a power boost, as the empath thought to herself _'maybe this will be easier than I thought.'_ Regardless, she decided to find a semi-indirect way to open the conversation.

"Do you trust me?" Raven asked the young man sitting across the couch from her. "I trust you with my life, but sometimes I don't feel like it's not reciprocated," she said honestly, while trying not to sound accusatory.

"Of course I trust you, Rae!" Beast Boy replied with more than a little shock in his voice. "Why would you think I didn't trust you?" His face now very strongly expressing confusion.

Raven thought carefully about what to say next. She felt kind of bad as it felt like she was guilting him into this, but it was important. "It's just... you've never told me or any of the other Titans about your past before you were in the Doom Patrol." She decided it might be a good idea to add something encouraging to keep him from getting defensive, "I know I can be a bitch to you sometimes, but I wouldn't use anything from your past to hurt you. I hope you know that."

Beast Boy seriously considered changing the subject somehow, or saying something to push Raven away for a while, but she was being gentle with him—way more gentle than she might normally be—and he figured it would be out of line to do anything to intentionally make her angry right now. He decided to finally come clean in a way, by explaining his reasons for not wanting to talk about it. "There's just some things from my past that I don't really want to remember. It's like, out of sight, out of mind. As long as I'm not thinking about the bad things from my past, they can't hurt me."

She suddenly realized her initial guess as to what defense mechanism was at play here was wrong. He wasn't in denial; he accepted that the memories existed and he accepted his emotional response to them. He wasn't using a pathological defense mechanism, but rather a neurotic one: he was isolating his painful memories and feelings. It made so much sense now; that's why it was so rare for her to pick up negative emotions from him.

"But what if there was a way for me to see your memories without you having to relive them?" Knowing the reason why Beast Boy didn't want to talk about his past, Raven was quick to think of a way she could learn about it without causing discomfort to him. "I would never do this without your permission, but if you're willing to let me, I could enter your mindscape and view your memories there without you being consciously aware of them."

"I'd probably be cool with that, except for the matter of my privacy," he replied. "I mean, I trust you and all, but there are some private thoughts which have to stay private—you wouldn't really appreciate it if I jumped into your mirror and started reading every thought I could, would you?"

She initially wanted to argue with him on that point, but quickly realized he was right. Still, she was undeterred. "Well, if you give me some ground rules to keep me away from memories you don't want me to see, I'll do my best to follow them. And I promise you I will not read your contemporary thoughts." She was giving him a way to accept and still not lose his privacy.

He considered her proposal very carefully. Beast Boy knew Raven well enough to know that if she made a promise, she would do her best to fulfill it, but he was still apprehensive about the possibility that she might accidentally stumble upon one of his more embarrassing contemporary secrets. His instincts, however, were telling him that it was time to let her in. "Okay," he finally accepted, "I guess if you stay away from any thoughts or memories from after I joined the Doom Patrol, it should be fine. But I should warn you there's some pretty intense memories in there."

Raven chose to ignore his warning. She had seen plenty of horrible things in her life, and although she'd realized her conversation with him that he had been isolating his traumatic memories, she still couldn't bring herself to believe that they could be as bad as what she knew about the pasts of Robin, Cyborg and herself. At this point she wasn't so much denying that he could have experienced trauma, but rather she figured that if it was really so bad it would have ended up overwhelming his defense mechanism. The tone of his voice when he warned her of his intense memories sounded quite exaggerated to her, as if his past was full of a large number of PTSD-inducing incidents. Isolation or not, she doubted that someone could experience a life with _that_ much trauma and still maintain a cheery disposition.

"I'm going to project my soul-self into your mind," she stated, in full monotone. "You can fall asleep if you want. Whether you're conscious or not really won't make much difference to the process, and after what you've been up to for the past two weeks, I would certainly advise that you get some rest." She got up and moved herself to a chair as Beast Boy began to lay himself out on the sofa, apparently choosing to heed her advice.

As the changeling drifted off to sleep, Raven began her astral projection into his mind. As her soul-self entered her friend's mind, she failed to notice that his corporeal being was beginning to stir in his sleep. For the next few hours, not a sound would be made in the room, except for the mumbling of a young man who was experiencing a particularly vivid dream.

* * *

Raven suddenly found herself lying face down in what felt like grass. As she got up, she found the assessment to be correct; all around her was nothing but golden grass and a few trees. For some reason, this particular part of Beast Boy's mindscape was an African savanna. She did not have much time to observe her surroundings before she realized she wasn't alone.

Sitting beside her was none other than the Beast himself. The sight quite naturally startled her; although the Beast had been her savior in the only previous interactions she'd had with him, to say that it was not an intimidating figure would be a gigantic lie. The Beast instantly picked up on her apprehensions. "Do not fear me," he said, "I am here to serve master and aid you." She was initially surprised at how articulate the Beast was, but then she remembered that the natural rules were somewhat different inside a mindscape than in the real world. "Your arrival was expected, and I have been chosen to accompany you."

Raven was taken slightly aback by the revelation. She'd been given a chaperon! Initially this offended her somewhat, as her first reaction was to assume that Beast Boy did not trust her. But then the offense faded as she realized the changeling's mind was probably not organized like hers, and her chaperon was probably a courtesy to both protect her from any dangers (if there were any) and help her find what she was looking for. At that moment, her thoughts were interrupted by a loud clap of thunder and she finally recognized that there was a storm on the savanna.

As she looked at the Beast apprehensively, he responded to her unspoken inquiry. "Master is having a nightmare." This had become a rather common occurrence around in Beast Boy's mind recently, as the news about Lamumba had uncovered long-buried memories, which the changeling was now reliving every time he entered REM mode. "Don't worry, it won't affect us." Raven was only partly relieved by the Beast's assurance; she was safe, but the storm looked particularly violent, which she could only surmise meant it was a bad nightmare.

The Beast began to walk and motioned for her to follow. After what seemed like fifteen minutes, they reached what appeared to be a grass hut, but crossing the threshold revealed that it was merely a portal leading to a different section of Beast Boy's mind. This one appeared to be the inside of a large building; certainly of the information age and most likely urban American. Glancing toward the walls, she noted the presence of a surprisingly large quantity of contemporary technology. Toward the ceiling on each wall ran what appeared to be a news ticker; although they were presently turned off, she was guessing they relayed information from the outside world collected when Garfield was conscious. One of the walls of the large room appeared to be entirely comprised of an enormous flat screen television. Each of the remaining walls was lined with computer kiosks. Taking in what she was seeing, she could only suppose this was an information hub and memory bank similar in purpose to Knowledge's library in Nevermore.

The mere existence of this information hub made her ponder the question of whether or not Beast Boy had similar manifestations to her emoticlones. It seemed entirely unreasonable for the changeling's mind to have an information hub of this magnitude and form if it didn't serve some purpose. Her thoughts were interrupted as the Beast led her to an elevator at the end of an adjoining hallway. As the doors closed, a tune began to play which was at once sweet and sinister, reminding her of a music box, except that a piano was also playing along in the background. The tune, together with an odd assortment of emotional impulses with which Beast Boy's mind was bombarding her made her feel simultaneous tinges of happiness, sorrow, security, terror, warmth and grief. She didn't know whether she wanted to smile or cry, and a quick glance at the Beast confirmed that she was not the only one being affected this way.

For about 90 seconds she could feel the elevator descending, until it suddenly stopped at what she could only presume was the deepest level of Gar's memory bank. With a ding, the door opened and she soon had an answer to the question she was pondering earlier about whether or not Gar had emoticlones of his own, as two figures stood before herself and the Beast.

"Hello Raven," said a voice that seemed a little too high to be Beast Boy's, "I am Busara and this is Akili. We are the manifestations of Garfield's wisdom and intellect, respectively." Raven suddenly noticed that, although Akili was a true clone of Beast Boy, Busara was not—although _her_ appearance was what Raven would expect Garfield would look like if he were a female. Raven began to open her mouth to ask a very obvious question, but was quickly cut off by Busara. "Before you ask, I have taken a feminine form in part because, in addition to being the personification of Garfield's wisdom, I am also his anima." This made sense; where the Beast was the primal side of Beast Boy and connected him to the Red, Busara connected him to the human collective unconscious. Although Raven was now plagued with the question of why she didn't have an animus. Or maybe she did but just never encountered him for some reason. Either way, she made a mental note to take a trip to Nevermore after she was done with all of this, and inquire Knowledge and Wisdom about her seeming lack of an animus.

As the party which now consisted of four made their way down another hallway, Raven took time to observe her new companions. It struck her how much femininity Busara exhibited; even the way she walked seemed to scream "_**woman**_," which made Raven more than a little uncomfortable as the fact that this was an integral part of Beast _Boy_'s mind created a bit of cognitive dissonance. It helped that Busara was otherwise very much like Beast Boy, including the green skin, hair and eyes, and lean, yet athletic figure (Beast Boy had gained in the area of muscle over the years, but never so much that he appeared to be like a bodybuilder); although Busara appeared to be shorter than Garfield. In their younger years, Beast Boy had been slightly shorter than Raven, but in his late teens he experienced a large growth spurt and now stood at 5'8"—not excessively tall by any means, but still a quarter of a foot taller than Raven's own contemporary stature. Busara seemed to be the exact same height as Raven. That was not the only similarity, as Raven had noticed Busara's breasts also appeared to be the same size as her own. Busara also wore her hair to the same length and in the same style as did Raven, who was beginning to wonder if there was a significance to these similarities to herself—but she quickly shrugged that thought off.

The top of Busara's uniform seemed to follow the same pattern as the top of Beast Boy's own uniform, except, as expected, in the area of the actual colors used. Busara's top was still black in the same places where Beast Boy's top would be, but in the places where Beast Boy would have been purple, Busara had more of an magenta. The front differed remarkably, however, in that the top was lower, and exposed the beginning of Busara's cleavage. Raven noted the absence of gloves on Busara's hands before she lowered her line of sight. The lower half of Busara's uniform consisted of a knee-length skirt, which was magenta with black stripes down the hips and thighs that matched in continuity with the top half of the uniform. Before turning her eye to Akili, Raven noted that Busara did not wear two-toned boots like Beast Boy did, but was rather wearing solid magenta shoes; there were no stockings or anything covering her lower legs between the bottom of the skirt and the tops of her shoes.

Akili's figure was a precise match to Garfield's. _'Same height, same figure, same green skin, hair and eyes, same cute ass...__oh Azar, I did _not _just think that!'_ She began to blush uncontrollably, both embarrassed and surprised by the thought that had just crossed her mind. She was now more than a little hesitant to continue eyeing Akili, but ultimately compromised with herself by choosing to focus on his clothing. With no great surprise, she noted that his ensemble was identical to Beast Boy's uniform, with two notable differences. The areas which would have been purple on Beast Boy's uniform were yellow on Akili's. Also, like Busara, Akili was not wearing glove. Raven noticed that unlike Busara, however, Akili had claws rather than fingernails. Raven had never seen Garfield without either gloves or a holographic ring on his hand, and Akili's claws made her curious about whether her friend had claws or fingernails.

She did not have much time to further ponder the question, however, as the party arrived at their destination. The plaque on the door said "Viewing Room 1A." Inside she found that it was an auditorium with a large projection screen at the front of the room—it looked like a movie theater.

* * *

**Author's Notes**  
In my mind's eye, the tune playing in the elevator was the first half of Clint Mansell's _The Nursery_ from the _Moon_ Original Soundtrack. Something about that piece seems to really fit the situation for some reason. Maybe because the tune's music-box-like tune seems to really fit with the descent into the part of Beast Boy's memory bank which holds his earliest memories.

_Akili_ and _Busara_ are both Swahili words. _Akili_ means "intelligence, intellect, cleverness, ingenuity, reason, wit, resourcefulness, inventiveness, sagacious, sense." _Busara_ means "wisdom, understanding, knowledge, insight, perception, good judgement; common sense; good sense, rationality, prudence, tact, judiciousness." Busara is intentionally the more outspoken of the pair—I figured that Beast Boy always has to use his judgement and common sense on a daily basis (for example, knowing which animals would be the best to morph into in a given situation), whereas he has never seemed to make full use of his intellectual capacity.

I was originally going to include Raven viewing Beast Boy's memories within this chapter, but I ultimately decided that this chapter was running long enough as it is, so I split what was going to be one chapter into two.

I made a reference to Raven's emoticlone Knowledge having a library because that seems to be the fanon as far as fanfics that deal with Nevermore are concerned. I decided it would make sense for Beast Boy's mindscape to have an information bank which, in contrast, disseminated information more by audiovisual means than by the literary means employed in Raven's mindscape.

I've been wanting to introduce a more overt element of sexual tension, but the opportunity really didn't present itself until this chapter. I figured it would make sense for Raven's mind to momentarily slip from her controlling grip on her feelings when she was looking at Akili because of an element of dissonance. It's Beast Boy, but not Beast Boy as she would normally think of him, so it presented an opportunity for that slip up to occur.

_**Annatheavidreader-**_Yeah, I like blending the cartoon, the comics and even some things that have been impressed upon me by other fanfics. I figure it creates characters who are multidimensional and, as a result, are more realistic than the rather simple portrayal the cartoon tended to give. Though, a very interesting thing which hasn't seemed to come up yet is where the blending will steer their (or rather, Raven's, since I've already made a bit of a reference of Beast Boy's) diets. I find it pretty interesting that in the comics Beast Boy ate meat, while (in the earlier comics) Raven was the vegetarian. I'm figuring the blend that I'm going for will end up leaving Beast Boy as a strict vegan as he was in the cartoon (since the whole cannibalism argument makes sense to me), while I'm probably also going to make Raven a (less strict) vegetarian, because one would figure that she's probably had a lot of nightmares in her life about death and destruction, which I would figure would make flesh pretty undesirable. But the way I figure it it, Raven does not seem to be the type who would eat tofu (there was even a point in the cartoons where Raven commended Beast Boy's integrity for not eating meat, but asked that he respect her choice not to eat _fake_ meat), but would seem to tend more natural, for lack of a better word. Either way, I'm not even sure that's something that'll even come up in the plot, but it's an example of the kind of things I've put thought into with regard to the characters. Also, Raven will be learning about Beast Boy's past in the next chapter for sure; what kind of turning point that might be in their dynamic, though, is something I'm not even sure about yet.

_**JasonVUK-**_Glad you like it. I hope it continues to be an enjoyable story for you as it moves forward.


	6. Chapter V: Passio Eius Pt 1

**Disclaimer:** I don't own the Teen Titans.

* * *

**Ascension of the Beast**

**Chapter V**

**Passio Eius Pt. 1 — The Day That Changed Everything**

The auditorium-style screening room had more seats than it would ever need. For a few minutes, Raven simply stood around waiting for one of the figments of Beast Boy's personality who had been accompanying her to direct her to her seat, but she ultimately realized from the lack of any such direct that she could sit anywhere she pleased. So, she chose to sit front and center. As she took her seat, Busara took the seat to her left, the Beast sat to her right, and Akili chose the seat directly behind hers.

Raven shrugged. _'Well, at least I won't be lonely,'_ she thought, sarcastically. In reality, she was feeling somewhat crowded, but chose not to voice her protest to them needlessly taking their seats so close to her. After all, she was in _their_ world, and maybe they were staying this close as part of their mission to chaperon her here.

"What we're going to watch is something of a compilation of Beast Boy's memories, ranging in time between his very early childhood and the date he joined the Doom Patrol," Busara noted. "It's been edited in such a manner as to give you a look at the more important memories from that period, while also not using too much of your time. We recognize your vulnerability while your soul-self is separated from your body, and with Garfield asleep, we don't want to drag this on any longer than it needs to be. If there's anything you need to see which isn't presented here, you and Garfield could probably arrange for another visit." Busara took a moment to gauge Raven's reaction before continuing. "Are you ready?"

Raven nodded. "Yes." At that moment, the lights went out and a moment later the screen in front of them was bathed in the light of a projector. A title card appeared on the screen, which read simply "Upper Lamumba, Age 5 Years." As the title card faded, the clip opened on a young boy who she presumed was Garfield. She could not immediately be certain, however, as the boy was a Caucasian with blond hair and blue eyes. Regardless of the boy's identity, she quickly noticed that her empathy was picking up on the child's emotions, feelings and impulses. It was rather odd for her empathy to pick up anything more than vague emotional residue, but at the moment she was experiencing every feeling he felt as strongly as if she were feeling it herself.

The scene before her initially seemed happy enough. It was a beautiful sunny day, and the boy seemed to be happy enough playing around as young children typically do, apparently attempting to capture frogs. Raven could sense that the child harbored an intense curiosity about the natural world, especially with regard to the Animal Kingdom; forgetting for a moment what she was watching, she supposed the child could probably make a good veterinarian or even be a zoologist when he grew up. Soon enough, however, the boy's play was interrupted by the call of a stern, but feminine voice.

"Garfield Mark Logan!" the voice said in a tone which automatically made Raven assume the woman was Beast Boy's mother (and that he was probably in some sort of trouble). "How many times have your father and I told you not to wander so close to the forest by yourself?" Raven finally assessed the boy's surroundings—it appeared to be some sort of complex in a jungle clearing. There were multiple buildings, a sign in front of the largest of which reading "Upper Lamumba Research Center," with "Science and Technology Advanced Research Laboratories" printed in smaller text on the line below. She presumed that the larger building comprised the ULRC's main laboratory and office spaces, while the smaller buildings were residential spaces. She also noticed that, while focusing so much on trying to catch and observe the amphibians, Garfield had managed to unwittingly wander within three feet of the edge of the clearing.

"I'm sorry mama," the boy said in a sweet voice, apparently trying to charm himself out of trouble. "I didn't mean to! I was trying to catch the frogs, and I didn't even know I followed them here. Please don't be mad at me," Garfield added that last part a cute/sad voice, as his face took a form Raven had seen before—he was giving his mother _the face_. It wasn't quite as effective in human form as it would have been if he were, for example, a kitten, but Raven presumed the young boy did not yet have his morphing abilities, and he was nevertheless helped out by the unconditional love a mother has for her child. His mother dropped the pretense of anger; even as a five-year old, Beast Boy was a skillful manipulator.

"It's okay baby," the woman walked over to embrace her son. "Just _please_ stay away from the forest. It's dangerous, and your father and I don't want you to get hurt." The woman took her son's hand and led him back toward the main building. As the two neared the larger building, a man who Raven could only presume to be Gar's father stepped out the door.

The man, like his wife and son, had blond hair and blue eyes. Raven noted that the man's jawline and facial structure heavily reminded her of her green friend, and made her realize for a moment how handsome she found the changeling to be. Gar's mother was herself quite beautiful, albeit in a realistic kind of way. Both had a warmth to them that was difficult to explain, although she was well acquainted with it as Garfield had inherited it in spades.

"Was he wandering too close to the forest again?" The man asked his wife—apparently Garfield was a repeat offender, though Raven of course knew enough of her friend's stubborn persistence that it was really no surprise. The boy's mother quietly nodded as her son frowned and hung his head. The man's gaze shifted to his son as he addressed him in a voice which betrayed that Garfield's parents were feeling deep concern over his tendency to wander off like that, but no anger. "Gar, you know that it's dangerous to go near the forest alone." The man winced for a fraction of a second, as if imagining terrible things which could befall his son; it was obvious to Raven by this point that Gar's parents loved him more than anything.

"Your mother and I have a lot of work to do," he continued in a tone which stated the matter without much chiding. "What would happen if you were to run into a dangerous animal and neither of us was there to protect you? Son, I love you more than life itself," the man's eyes seemed to be welling up slightly, "please don't ever go near the forest by yourself again. Your mother and I don't want anything bad to happen to you." The boy's face and posture demonstrated that he was sorry for having disobeyed his parents, and guilty for making them worry.

The woman placed her hand on her husband's shoulder. "I think he understands, Mark," she said as she cast a loving smile toward the man. "It doesn't seem like he intentionally went over there at any rate; from what he said, he was trying to catch frogs and they led him over there without his having realized where he was."

"Still, Marie," the man's voice faltered ever so slightly, "whether he's there intentionally or not, it's _still_ dangerous." Mark thought for a moment and turned his eyes back in the direction of his son. "Gar, I want you to promise me something," the elder Logan male said in a calm, loving voice. "Promise me that you'll be more careful."

The young boy's reply was to be expected: "Okay baba, I promise I'll be more careful and not even go back by the forest again accidentally when I'm by myself," the five-year old said in a surprisingly articulate voice. Raven could feel that Garfield was making no attempts at deception; he meant his words as he made his promise to his father. A moment later, Mark and Marie returned to work, and Garfield was left to his own devices once again, quite bored with the lack of anything to hold his attention at the moment. Soon, however, he resumed his frog catching, albeit this time a little more careful to mind where he was and where he was going.

A while later, a Land Rover arrived at the compound, out of which a large man and two boys emerged. The man's clothing seemed to indicate he was an African tribesman of extremely high stature. As Garfield's parents addressed him as "Mfalme Tawaba," Raven instantly recognized that this was most likely the King Tawaba the news had reported disappeared on Tuesday. Suddenly she understood why Gar's obsession with the Lamumba situation had intensified that week; it appeared Tawaba was a friend of the Logan family. Raven presumed that the two boys were two of the King's sons.

Garfield, deeply immersed in his own activity, was initially only half-aware of the arrival of the King and his sons. That is, until the younger of the two—who appeared to be Garfield's age—approached him. "Hujambo, Garfield, haligani?" the boy greeted Garfield.

"Sijambo sana, Jelani, nawe?" Garfield's reply was the first element of the memory which truly shocked Raven. She had known that Dick, with Batman providing the finest education possible, was multilingual. She knew that Starfire could learn any language in the blink of an eye by merely kissing someone who spoke it. She herself was fluent in a multitude of languages, including English, German, Latin, Romanian, Classical and Modern Greek, Ancient Sumerian, Sanskrit, and Ancient and Coptic Egyptian. But _never_ in her wildest of imaginative moments had she ever even remotely considered the possibility of Beast Boy of all people being fluent in any languages other than English. Indeed, if he had told her, she would have incredulously thought he was joking. But here, right before her, he was speaking a language that _she_ didn't even know. Indeed, she couldn't even seem to positively identify it—she was certain it was a Bantu language and she suspected that it was Swahili, but she was not well enough versed in African languages to know for sure.

"Sijambo, asante. Unafanyaje?" the other boy, whose name she presumed was Jelani, replied. As her shock over the changeling having been multilingual at such a young age—or at all—wore off, Raven was beginning to become a little annoyed by the fact that she couldn't understand a word of what they were talking about.

"Ninanyaka vyura, lakini silifanikiwi," Garfield's face bore a frown as he replied. "Nilinyaka tu moja." Raven's annoyance at being unable to understand the two children's words was building gradually stronger as she could see that whatever Gar had said saddened him, and she didn't know what it was or why it did.

"Nitakusaidia!" replied Jelani, which put a smile back on Garfield's face. At this point, Raven's annoyance of sensing the sudden shifts in emotion without knowing a word of what was being said was getting pretty severe. Gar had gone from momentarily slightly self-conscious to content on the drop of a hat. Raven figured she wasn't going to miss much if her attention to this part of the memory wasn't full.

"What language are they speaking?" the empath asked the embodiment of her friend's wisdom. The question had been nagging at her long enough, and she figured now would be a better time than ever to get an answer.

"Kiswahili," Busara's reply confirmed Raven's initial suspicion. "Of course, English was Garfield's first language. His parents taught him Afrikaans, French and Swahili, in order to facilitate him living in Africa. He learned sign language in order to be able to communicate with some of the great apes who were held in the lab where his parents worked—his love for animals is not a result of his ability to morph into them, that trait has always been there in him. During his time with the Doom Patrol, Mento forced him to learn Latin and Spanish. He also took an interest in and learned Japanese after the Titans' excursion in Tokyo." Raven was shocked by the breadth of multilingualism Busara was freely describing. "Due to mutual intelligibility with languages he's fluent in, he is also capable of comprehending Galician and Romanian, as well as (to a more limited degree) Dutch and Portuguese. It would probably take very little effort for him to learn how to speak German and Italian as well—although he has not yet achieved anything near fluency in either of these languages, he does have a limited working understanding of them. Also, let's not forget his proficient capacity to communicate with animals when he takes their form. However, Arabic confuses him thoroughly; it is one language I do not anticipate him _ever_ learning."

"Why hasn't he ever told anyone that he's multilingual, or let on about it in any way?" Raven was beginning to become more than a little frustrated with Garfield for having hidden his linguistic abilities.

"He has in a way—did you never notice that he was always fully able to understand everything Más and Menos said? Well, there he showed that he understands Spanish." Raven was visibly unsatisfied with Busara's explanation, as it did not explain why he never disclosed knowledge of the other seven languages and forms of human communication he was fluent in. Busara explained further in response. "Secondly, being underestimated has long been one of his greatest advantages—_all_ of the Titans would probably be frozen right now if the Brain knew to consider Garfield a credible threat, and the reason the Brain did not consider him so was because the Brain was unaware of his full capacity..."

"Wait! You're telling me that Beast Boy, _my_ Beast Boy, the Titans' Beast Boy—the same Beast Boy who once gave Cyborg a computer virus," Raven took a deep breath, "you're telling me that he's been hiding his full range of capabilities for a tactical advantage?!" Raven was in part incredulous of what Busara was telling her, while the part that did believe was becoming more than a little frustrated with the changeling's perceived lack of trust. "He could have told me! I'm not about to tell our enemies anything!"

"He does trust you, though. The tactical advantage of being underestimated was only ever the reason why he did not readily use his full ability in battle," Busara replied, attempting to help Raven understand. "As for why he hid his full capabilities from the team...he felt it was outside of his niche. For reasons which you will soon understand, Garfield is terrified of losing the people he cares about. He ended up figuring that if he didn't fit into a certain role, the team wouldn't have a purpose for him. Leadership was Robin's role, technical and medical expertise were Cyborg's roles, rational advice and supernatural expertise were your roles, and Starfire, in her sweet and naive nature, was the team's heart. Garfield figured his niche was that of comic relief, and he loves you and the other Titans more than anything—he didn't want to lose you."

Raven's eyes opened in a manner displaying full shock at what Busara was saying. "How could he possibly think we would have abandoned him just because he didn't have a specialized role? We weren't just a team, we were a family!"

"In a word," Busara began her reply quickly after Raven finished her question, "his experience in the Doom Patrol taught him that he was expendable; that if he didn't have some special role that no one else on the team could fulfill, there was no place for him on the team. It also taught him that there was no place for him on the team if he couldn't fulfill the team's expectations of him, which were always unattainably high in the Doom Patrol and impossibly low in the Titans. How much of a hurry Robin was to send him to jail during the whole incident with _him_," Busara pointed back at the Beast, "also didn't help matters."

While Raven and Busara were having their conversation, the older of Tawaba's sons, whose name Raven presumed was Mosi, had joined Garfield and Jelani in their game. However, soon after the completion of the conversation, Tawaba began to approach the boys. "Mosi! Jelani!" the King called to his sons, "njoo, tunaenda sasa."

"Baba," Jelani began his reply with an obviously sad look on his face, "naweza kubaki hapa?" Raven presumed from context that Tawaba was probably telling his sons it was time to leave, and Jelani was asking if he could stay longer.

"Si sasa," replied the King. "Unaweza kucheza na Garfield wakati ujao." The King then turned to Gar, and spoke with a soft look on his face that betrayed the fact that the King's friendly disposition toward the Doctors Logan extended to their son as well. "Samahani, Garfield. Wewe ni mtoto mzuri, lakini Jelani ina mambo yeye lazima kufanya leo." Based on the tone of the man's voice, it sounded like he wanted to make sure Garfield knew that he did not mean any offense to him by refusing to allow his son to stay and play longer.

After Garfield exchanged what Raven could only assume were parting salutations with the King and his sons, the boy proceeded to search for something else to do. He apparently decided it was a good time to see what his parents were doing, so he entered the lab building. Although this was the largest building in the compound, it was still a relatively small structure, which likely shortened Garfield's search considerably. When he entered the room where his parents were, they were experimenting on something or other; either way, it didn't really spark his attention so well and hence the memory really didn't show much of what they were doing.

Predictably, given his innate curiosity about animals, the boy made his way over to the animal cages. The one animal that most caught his eye was a green monkey—he had only heard about such a thing before, and this was the first one he'd seen with his own two eyes. As the boy drew closer to the caged animal, his father noticed. "Gar, get away from there NOW!" The man's voice was far more stern than the previous conversation and seemed to have an undertone of panic to it. Garfield immediately did as he was told, and his mother rushed over to escort him out of the room. Mark turned to his colleague, "sorry about that distraction, Sam."

As his mother was leading him out of the room, he overheard the other doctor's reply. "I wish I could say it was okay, Mark, but it's not. We have to maintain professional conditions here if we want to understand this virus, and having a child interrupting everything like that can't stand. Can't you and Marie send him back to the States or something?"

At this point, Gar was obviously hurt, as his parents' reaction of pushing him out of the lab and their colleague's words had made him feel unwanted. He found solace by a predictable means, however; humans might reject him, but animals almost never did. He proceeded to grab a bag of food and then, forgetting the promise he had made to his parents earlier that day, ventured into the woods to interact with the wildlife. Though he never went far into the forest—the research facility and the residential huts built around it were always visible—Raven knew this was a dangerous choice. But in Garfield's emotional state, he seemed to forget that. Raven couldn't help but see an analogue in how Garfield's sulking emotions on that day were leading him to be less aware of danger and the day, later in his life, when his sulking over having been left out by the Titans nearly led to him being press-ganged into serving as an alien's pet—deep in her heart, part of Raven actually still felt guilty about that.

Generally, his interactions with the animals were positive. He would give an animal a handful of food, and the animal would sit with him for a while, allowing him to pet it—Raven was quite surprised by how this young version of her friend was able to so easily gain the trust of wild animals. However, as the sun began threatening to dip beneath the horizon, things most decidedly took a turn for the worst. Garfield crossed paths with another green monkey, and this animal wasn't so apt to be friendly. Within seconds, the monkey bit into Garfield's shoulder. Thankfully, the animal fled soon after biting the boy, opting not to go as far as killing him on the spot, but this was little comfort for Garfield.

The boy was able to observe the spot where the animal had bitten him. A large piece of his shirt had been torn off, and the bite was bleeding quite a bit, but otherwise it was a small wound. The truly worrying part, however, was that the skin around the wound was beginning to take on a green tone. As the boy began to stumble back out into the clearing, he appeared visibly feverish. The quality of the memory at this point began to degrade quite rapidly, as the boy was apparently losing consciousness as his immune symptom attempted to battle this almost unnaturally fast-acting virus. His last words before he passed out half way to the research building were a desperate cry for his mother's help.

Garfield's consciousness barely flashed into being as his mother crouched over his body, a highly pronounced look of concern in her eyes. "GAR! Come on, talk to me baby! Please..." the woman's composure began to break down as she noticed the green discoloration surrounding her son's wound. "Please Gar, you have to tell me what happened," she said, with tears of worry beginning to stream from her eyes.

"I... green monkey," was all the boy could manage to say, but it was more than enough. The woman's cries suddenly became more frantic, backed now more by feelings of despair than by concern. Garfield seemed to fall back into unconsciousness with this view in sight.

"What happened to him?" Raven asked Busara, the concern in her own voice severely pronounced. "I mean, I know he was bit by the monkey, but why is he so sick, and why is his mother so..."

"Despondent?" Busara paused for a moment before explaining to Raven what happened. "That monkey was of a rare species of highly aggressive primates found only in Upper Lamumba, generally known as the Lamumban green macaque, or by the scientific classification _Macaca viridis_. They are the most common carriers of a virus called Sakutia, which, much like Rabies, is transmitted via contact between the host's saliva and the victim's circulatory system (i.e., the virus enters the bloodstream in saliva injected by bites). The virus causes an infectious disease called the Green Fever, or, less frequently, the Green Death. Both of these names are quite appropriate; a high fever is among the earliest symptoms and, prior to Garfield, the recorded lethality rate in humans was 100%—Garfield was the first human in recorded history to survive the disease."

"I'm gonna guess that wasn't luck," Raven responded, thoroughly interested in how Beast Boy could end up being the first person in history to survive this disease, without any of the Titans ever having learned about it.

"You know how stubbornly persistent he can be and how determined he is to ensure the safety of those he cares about?" Raven simply nodded in response to Busara's words. "Those were inherited traits. While Marie Logan was despondent, Mark Logan was determined to do anything he could to save his son's life. The Doctors Logan were in Lamumba because Dr. Samuel Register had recruited them to work on a S.T.A.R. Labs program studying Sakutia. Mark had a proficient understanding of the virus's mechanisms, which, combined with his desperation to save his son, resulted in a moment of absolute genius. The virus is latent in most animals other than humans, so what Mark did was create a serum by combining some mutagen—don't ask me what mutagen, because I only have access to information Garfield learned—with DNA from many different species from throughout the Animal Kingdom. The mutagen-DNA cocktail reacted with Garfield's own DNA, causing changes in his immune system which forced the virus into latency."

"So, he's still infected then?" Raven was suddenly worried about whether Garfield's saliva could kill someone.

"In a word, yes," Busara's reply was going to be complex, as appeared to be usual. "Some of his antibodies can kill the virus, but only before the virus infects the cells of the host. Since Garfield was already sick when he was given the serum, it could not eliminate the virus within him. However, it has made it impossible for him to transmit the disease to other humans, because at the same time he transmits the virus, he would also transmit the antibodies which kill the virus."

* * *

**Author's**** Notes****  
**I took a lot of artistic license for the finer details in this chapter, but the overall theme of Beast Boy's past is mostly canon, created from a composite of multiple sources. The rest of the _Passio Eius_ arch will probably be the same way.

I was originally going to do _Passio Eius_ as a single chapter, but the part about the day he was bitten kept running on so much that I was worried the chapter would be too long if I didn't split it up. I mean, as this chapter currently stands, it's nearly 4,800 words. But I'm also worried that I may have digressed too much with the dialogue and everything; I'm trying to walk a line between showing Raven learning increasingly more about how Garfield's personality works and why it's the way it is, on the one hand, versus not wanting to bring the story's plot momentum to a standstill, on the other.

_**Annatheavidreader-**_I'm trying to restrain myself a bit with the BBRae tension in part because I'm worried that if I end up writing too much sexual tension between them, I'll end up writing a lemon into the story somewhere, and I don't really think it'd be a good idea for me to write a lemon into my first story on the site. Nevertheless, don't be surprised if I end up having to change the rating.

_**JasonVUK-**_An anima/animus is an archetypal personification of the unconscious self, the concept of which originally having been conceived by the analytical psychologist Carl Jung in his theory of the collective unconscious. The unconscious self of a given individual will always be the opposite gender of that person's conscious self—so that's why Beast Boy, as a male, would have a feminine anima. Incidentally, Raven should have a masculine animus of her own, but she has never encountered 'him' yet (then again, I'm not even confirming that 'he' even exists at this point, but merely stating that 'he' should...so, consider Raven's animus to be sorta like a Schrödinger's cat for now).


	7. Chapter VI: Passio Eius Pt 2

**Disclaimer: **I still do not own the Teen Titans.

* * *

**Ascension of the Beast**

**Chapter VI**

**Passio Eius Pt. 2 — The Ostracized Mongoose**

As Garfield's memories continued, Raven noticed that Garfield's parents had begun to treat every day with him as though it were a second change following his horrifically close brush with death. They spent a lot more time with him after the incident, although a large part of that could have been that Mark's desperate drive to save his son's life actually expedited the completion of much of their work. Dr. Register only needed Marie on rare occasions now, and the remaining workload was light enough that Mark could work normal hours.

Garfield now looked like the familiar Beast Boy that Raven knew and...well, didn't hate. His blond hair, blue eyes and ivory skin had now turned various shades of green. Raven observed that the combination of his green features and trademark pointy ears, together with the diminutive stature of his five-year old form, made Garfield look even more like an elf than he did when he was in his young teens. Raven would tease him about that from time to time, but in all honesty she always found it to be somehow endearing; well, at least until he'd say something about the ladies not being able to resist his pointy ears.

The title card for this reel noted that Gar was now about six months older, though the setting was still in Upper Lamumba. It was another sunny day, and the young boy was enjoying quality time spent with his mother. Gar and Marie were in a field of what appeared to be sugarcane, picking the canes and chewing on them in order to enjoy the cane juice locked within. Raven figured this was probably the closest thing to candy that was available to Garfield under the circumstances.

Eventually the boy's sugar tooth was satisfied and he approached his mother. "Mama," his words caused her to immediately look at him with an inquisitive, yet very loving look. "Can we go to the village? I want to play with the other kids." Garfield had not been to the village since before the incident, and during the interceding months he'd only had Tawaba's sons for playmates during their irregular visits to the compound.

Marie hesitated before answering her son's request. She seemed to be in deep thought, but Raven could guess what she was thinking about—her son's happiness. On the one hand, Marie could say no, but that would leave Garfield with no friends to play with. On the other hand, she could say yes, but...well, how the other village children would react to a green boy was something to worry about. Marie was obviously caught between a rock and a hard place; she wanted her son to be happy, but either one of the options before her could lead to great unhappiness. "Okay, Gar, we'll go to the village," the woman presented a smile to her son, but her eyes betrayed her misgivings.

The two began walking and the scene transitioned to their arrival in the village. Garfield was initially excited to be around other children, but the other children looked at him with fear. Tawaba was a progressive leader who sought to establish greater justice among his people, but there had been longstanding superstitions about physical abnormalities in the local culture, and many of the people in the tribe were not so tolerant. Garfield soon noticed the frightened stares, but that was not the thing that hurt the worst.

As his mother visited with the King and his wife, the boy located Jelani. Garfield wanted to play, but Jelani was playing with other children from the tribe, and these children began to make fun of the poor boy. Hurtfully, Jelani quickly caved to the peer pressure and rejected the boy who had previously been his best friend. To say that Garfield was hurt would be an extreme understatement—Raven herself began to cry from the emotions the memory was feeding her. A mix of sorrow and a strong feeling of betrayal were dominant in an overpowering form. Garfield began to break down and ran away, finding a hiding spot among some bushes in an effort to escape the torment.

After a while, Mosi discovered the crying boy. The older boy asked Garfield a question that Raven could not understand, though she presumed he was asking the younger boy what was wrong. Raven guessed from the fact that Jelani's name was mentioned in his response, that Garfield was telling Mosi what happened. The older boy showed no signs of malice or fear toward Gar, but instead sat next to the boy and sympathetically placed a hand on his shoulder. Mosi spoke in a supportive, conciliatory tone, which seemed to calm the green boy. As the older boy stood and offered his hand to help Garfield up, he said something else in a humorous tone, which caused Gar to crack up laughing as he got to his feet.

Mosi and Garfield walked back to Tawaba's home, and upon their arrival the King's older son apparently told his father what Jelani had done. Tawaba seemed angry, which would seem to be a natural reaction. A King's son is supposed to be a leader to his community, and Tawaba seemed to live by the wisdom that a leader's role is to help protect the unfortunate and the weak. A leader, in such a view, does not bully others and surely must never give in to peer pressure on matters pertinent to moral character. It was fairly clear that Jelani was not going to have a happy evening.

As Garfield and Marie left the village, Raven thought the memory from that day was over—she was wrong. When the clip didn't end, she looked confusingly at Busara, as if to ask the unspoken question "what next?"

Busara apparently understood the unspoken question. "No one—not Garfield, not Mark, not Marie—had any idea he could..."

At that moment, the memory showed Marie and Gar getting into no small degree of trouble. The black mamba is quite possibly the most feared snake on the African continent. Normally, when threatened, the snake will use its impressive (for a snake) speed to try to evade the threat, but they will attack when cornered. If it comes to the point of an attack, the results are typically not good for whatever animal the snake attacked—the venom of a black mamba can kill an adult human in the span of about 20 minutes, generally meaning there will _not_ be time to get anti-venom.

Unfortunately, Marie and Gar accidentally cornered a black mamba while they were walking home. The snake took a defensive posture, raising its head and exposing its black mouth while exposing a neck flap and hissing at Marie. The snake was trying to scare them away, and Marie (being a zoologist) should have known to grab Gar and run, but fear paralyzed her as she forgot everything she new about the black mamba.

Raven could feel Garfield's emotions from the moment, and until the snake lunged in Marie's direction, the dominant feeling was shear terror. But then a different emotion took over little more than a fraction of a second before a green blur shot from where Garfield had been standing—a powerful determination to protect his loved ones. The snake bite that Mare had been expecting was never delivered. Fearing the absolute worst case—that the snake had bitten her son instead—Marie looked to where Gar had been standing a moment earlier, and he wasn't there. She then looked to where the snake had been and was shocked to find a green mongoose consuming the body of the now-dead snake.

After apparently searching her memory of zoology, it appeared that Marie could not recall a species of mongoose that was _green_. In fact, the only mammals in the entire country which were green were the green macaque and her own son. Her confusion only seemed to deepen as she apparently remembered the green blur. The woman looked back and forth between the spot where her son had been standing and the green mongoose, seemingly afraid she had gone insane for what conclusion her mind was drawing. The woman looked at the mongoose. "Gar?" she asked in a voice as sweet and maternal as it was confused and afraid. The clip ended as the mongoose responded to the name.

Busara decided to directly tell Raven what had happened, in order to save the time that would have been consumed by watching other memories from when Gar was a mongoose. "Marie almost fainted in the moment after the clip ended. Garfield had indeed morphed into a mongoose and, in the first act of heroism in his young life, saved his mother from a bite which almost certainly would have killed her." Raven was listening intently.

"But the story's not that simple, is it?" Raven asked, knowing the answer to her question. Busara shook her head in confirmation.

"You know how Garfield was unable to really control himself when he took the form of the Beast?" Raven nodded in response to Busara's question. "His first morph was rather similar in principle. Although his memory stored the information and some basic parts of his conscious mind were operational, he did not have control of his powers at the time. Heck, he didn't even _know_ about his powers. He didn't return to human form until the next time he fell asleep—maintaining an animal form while sleeping is something he can only consciously do." Busara paused for a moment to allow Raven to digest the information before continuing. "His parents being scientists, obviously wanted to figure out what happened. They ended up settling on the hypothesis that the serum which saved his life also imbued him with metamorphic powers. They found that he was able to morph into any animal which was lesser than or equal to his size—no one would realize he could morph into animals larger than himself until he was in the Doom Patrol. But, being parents, Mark and Marie also recognized that Garfield's morphing abilities could be beneficial to him in under some circumstances, and that he needed to be able to control them regardless, so for the next seven months they worked with him to help him gain greater control of his powers."

"Seven months? Why did they stop?" Raven at this point knew that she probably wasn't going to like the answer, and Busara's depressed sigh and frown confirmed that it probably wasn't going to be pleasant, but she needed to know. "What happened?"

* * *

**Author's Notes  
**I'm not quite as satisfied with this chapter as I was with the previous chapter. I feel like the beginning of the chapter—dealing with the initial ostracism directed at Garfield—was a failure, but I didn't really know how to re-write it and I felt like it needed to be there. That part also lacks in dialogue, but translating it to English wouldn't make sense because Raven can't understand them (whereas an English translation would suggest that she could), and figuring out what these phrases would be in Swahili was getting tiresome.

I wanted to wrap up the _Passio Eius_ arch with this chapter, but again things ended up going longer than I expected. I'm hoping the next chapter will wrap it up so I can continue with the rest of the story.

_**Annatheavidreader-**_I wasn't thinking there would be a lemon anytime soon at any rate—it would seem very unnatural for their relationship to take that kind of sudden leap, unless alcohol was involved, in which case the aftermath would probably destroy it. If there is going to be a lemon, it'll be in the second half of the fic; but my issue is that my cautious side is worried about even the remotest possibility of censorship, while my creative side feels like there _should_ be a lemon somewhere toward the end of the story, which would feed into the plot of the sequel (I already have the most basic skeletons of plot lines for a few sequels in my mind; given the reaction to this fic so far, there's a fairly good chance I'll actually write them). I like that you liked the part about Busara explaining things like that—I envisioned Busara's objective in the interaction with Raven while she's in Garfield's mindscape would be to act as a sort of guide to help Raven better understand what she's seeing.

_**I Tear Paper For Fun-**_Well, not everything I'm writing is canon (some of which being because the canon can be really vague and conflicting, but I'm also taking some purely artistic license in some cases), but as far as the things that are canon go, I try and I'm glad you appreciate my research. I already have most of Gar's emoticlones figured out, and they will eventually make appearances, though most likely not during Raven's current visit to BB's mindscape. I also intend for there to be more extensive explorations of both Garfield's mindscape and Nevermore at some point, which will be moderately important to the plot.


	8. Chapter VII: Passio Eius Pt 3

**Disclaimer: ** I still don't own the Teen Titans.

* * *

**Ascension of the Beast**

**Chapter VII**

**Passio Eius Pt 3 — Farewell To Childhood**

"...so for the next seven months they worked with him to help him gain greater control of his powers."

"Seven months? Why did they stop?" Raven at this point knew that she probably wasn't going to like the answer, and Busara's depressed sigh and frown confirmed that it probably wasn't going to be pleasant, but she needed to know. "What happened?"

Busara didn't answer but instead gestured toward the screen. The title card for this clip indicated that the events of this memory took place seven months after the previous memory, in the Mtokifo District of Upper Lamumba. Gar's parents were loading up a boat with supplies, while Garfield seemed pretty happy about they trip they were going to take. "There was an isolated population of mountain gorillas downstream which Marie wanted to study. Since the Sakutia project was on hold and Dr. Register had been recalled to the States, Mark decided it would be a good time to take the trip his wife wanted to take," Busara noted.

"Baba," the effect that living in Africa had on young Garfield was clear in his use of the Swahili 'Baba' and 'Mama' in addressing his parents even in English, "when are we gonna go?" The boy was more than a little bored as his parents loaded up the boat, but he was also very anxious to get going. The boy had always loved wildlife, and it appeared that in his youth Garfield had a special disposition toward primates. He was clearly very excited at the opportunity to see gorillas in their natural environment—a fact which was driven home by his jumping and screams of joy when Mark finally told him it was time to go.

The river was rather wide, with perhaps 500 feet or so separating its banks even at this point far upstream. That said, it was difficult to determine its normal size just from this memory, as the grass sticking out of the water showed that it was riding higher than normal. The river obviously carried more than its fair share of sediment, as the water had a very dark grayish-brown tone which was nearly black. Near the banks, deadheads could be seen just barely poking above the water's surface, which was really not surprising given that the river seemed to be surrounded mostly by dense jungle. Perhaps more foreboding was the fact that, if they looked very closely, one could see the flow separation created in the water by the presence of deadheads and boulders which were now just barely under the surface and, thanks to the river's height and murkiness, otherwise invisible.

The boat wasn't tiny, yet it wasn't overwhelmingly huge either. It was basically a 20-foot motorboat, driven by twin outboard motors. The boat seemed to be quite new and looked moderately expensive. Raven was almost certain that either the Logans or S.T.A.R. Labs had imported it into Lamumba from either North America or Western Europe, most likely for transportation up and down the rivers where they were required to head out into the field in areas where there were no roads. However, the outboard motors, together with the known navigation hazards and the fact that every memory she was being shown was important, were causing Raven to feel a sense of impending doom.

As Mark piloted the boat, his wife was working on their son's education. Marie and Gar were sitting in the back of the boat, the woman pointing out animals and quizzing her son about them. "Okay Gar," she pointed at a bird flying parallel to the boat, "what kind of bird is that?"

The boy paused initially, carefully observing the black bird flying above them and by their side. "It's a fan-tailed raven," the boy responded, to which his mother smiled and nodded. "It's a member of the crow family and it lives in Arabia and East Africa. It eats opportunestly..."

"Opportunistically," Marie corrected her son. Apparently this was more than just a zoology lesson, as the woman seemed quite intent on building Gar's English vocabulary as well.

"Yeah, opportun-ist-ic-al-ly," Garfield sounded out the word slowly to make sure he'd said it right. "It croaks like a frog, and it's like one of the smallest birds people call ravens."

"Very good, Gar," Marie commended her son's display of knowledge on the subject. "Why is it unusual that we're seeing it right now?" Marie gave her son a bonus question.

"Two reasons, mama," Garfield began, "because they usually like to stay in deserts, and because they don't usually live this far south." Raven was impressed to see that Garfield was so intelligent as a small child, but this revelation raised more than a few questions. She chose, however, not to ask Busara about it, and presumed that Akili's currently silent nature may have something to do with explaining the infrequency of Gar's exposition of any sort of intellectual prowess.

Marie looked ahead, trying to find an animal to point out which her son would have time to identify. "Okay, what's that?" she asked while pointing at a medium-sized antelope which was standing on the river bank, apparently taking a drink from the river. Garfield almost didn't get a chance to see it before they passed by it.

"Um," the boy hesitated for a moment, "a duiker?" He was correct, but it wouldn't matter much. Before his mother had a chance to reply, the boat was rocked by a sudden very hard shudder. The boat had apparently struck one of the navigational hazards hiding beneath the raised surface of the river. The hull wasn't pierced, but one of the outboard motors was torn entirely off the boat and the other's propeller was disfigured to the point of being completely worthless.

"Marie, come here," Mark said, in a voice that, although he seemed to be trying to keep a degree of stoic strength to it, nevertheless betrayed that something was _very_ wrong. Marie immediately went to the boats cockpit, where she and her husband had a conversation which Gar couldn't hear. Nevertheless, the looks on their faces betrayed a sense of deep sorrow and concern.

They tried to stay strong for their son as they approached him. "Gar, baby," Marie Logan was finding it particularly difficult to speak without breaking into tears. "We n-need you to do something for us," her effort to maintain a strong front failed as she said it. Mark would have to take over.

"Son," the man was also finding the situation painfully difficult. "I need you to do your mother and I a big favor, okay?" he said, his voice in a loving tone. "We...we need you to change into a bird and fly away. Fly to shore, and be safe."

"Why?" Garfield, even at such a young age, could tell that something was wrong. His parents would never leave him behind. "What's wrong?"

"Just please do it, son," Mark was now finding it nearly impossible himself to hold the tears back. "Get away from here, and try to find your way back to Tawaba, he'll take care of you." Both Mark and Marie wrapped their arms around their son, but Mark was still the only one of his parents who could find the strength to hold back the tears long enough to speak. "Go, and remember we'll always love you. We'll always be with you." Mark was unable to hold the tears back any longer, and they soon streamed down his cheeks.

"It'll be okay, baby," Marie found the strength to say in a voice so sweet, one would not be able to tell she'd been crying without having seen it. "Please be safe. We love you," the woman gave her son a final kiss on the cheek. "Please go. Please be safe."

Garfield seemed to know now that this was a life-threatening situation. He really didn't want to leave his parents there. He really wanted to figure out a way to save them. But they were telling him to go with such urgency, he had to comply. He morphed into the first bird he could think of—the most recent bird he had seen. A moment later, a green fan-tailed raven took to the sky.

As he got into the air, he realized what the problem was. There was a waterfall a half mile downstream, and, with no working motors, the boat was a dead stick. Garfield frantically tried to think of a way to save his parents, as he circled the boat in the air. Every second now felt like an hour to him, but, since he couldn't find any way to save them, this ended up being the most tortuous moments of his entire life. As the boat went over the falls, Raven could feel as her friend's heart broke. The terror, the pain, the sorrow, the guilt—all these things which he had been feeling flooded over her.

As Gar flew down to the base of the falls, Raven could feel as his hope died. Mark and Marie Logan were dead. Their son flew to the nearest bank and returned to his human form; the only thing he could do now was cry. As the boy lied on the side of the river, crying himself to sleep, Raven's own emotions began to strengthen. Her mind couldn't get away from the thought that no one deserved that—especially someone as sweet as _her_ Garfield. Normally the stoic, Raven found herself crying as the scene faded; and the odd thing was that she couldn't attribute it solely to his emotions—_her_ emotions were driving her to tears just as much. "G-Gaaaar," she managed between her sobs, "w-why didn't y-you tell m-me?"

She hoped that was the last traumatic memory...oh, how did she hope it was, but her hopes were for naught. After Garfield woke from his tear-soaked slumber, he did as his parents had requested—he found his way back to Tawaba's village. The King took Garfield in as if he were one of his own, and this seemed to give the boy an elevated position in the village's society. Not that he noticed, of course, as he was still very much despondent from the death of his parents, and guilt-ridden from his inability to save them.

By the time of his seventh birthday, his emotional state had still made little perceivable progress. His once and future sunny disposition was completely absent. He was like a kid who...well, just lost his parents. Jelani seemed to have been set straight from his previous betrayal, and Mosi was as always supportive of the younger boy. However, the efforts of Tawaba and his family to raise Garfield's spirits had generally failed.

The court of King Tawaba had two resident shamans. The elder of the two was Mobu, who appeared to absolutely despise the green child. The younger of the two, Kweli, had the precise opposite disposition toward Garfield—he adored the boy, and added his efforts to assist the King's family in trying to bring him out of his depressed state. "Why do the holy men have such different opinions of Gar?" Raven asked. "I mean, I swear the older one looks like he hates him with an unholy passion, while the younger one seems to love him like a son."

"Mobu was a jealous and insecure man," Busara replied. "He was jealous of the esteem the King had for the Logan family and felt threatened by the scientific knowledge Mark and Marie brought to the village. His hatred for Mark and Marie transferred over to Garfield, especially after Garfield was welcomed into the King's household." Busara paused for a moment, clearing her throat. "Mobu ultimately ended up feeling that the Logan family's enjoyment of so much royal favor was diminishing his own influence over the King, and he was a self-serving hypocrite."

"Okay, that answer's half of the question," Raven responded, taking particular note of the fact that Busara had not answered why Kweli liked Gar so much. "What's with the other one, then?"

"Kweli, for one thing, has always been a tolerant and kind man," Busara's reply indicated more than ample respect for the man, "and he's always tended to strive toward embodying African ideals like, for lack of a better example, Ubuntu. Even though, Ubuntu—or Utu, as the Swahili cognate to the Nguni term would be—is more of a philosophy common to Southern Africa than to Eastern Africa...but it's not foreign to Lamumba by any means."

Raven was somewhat confused. "I recognize that you're the embodiment of Gar's wisdom and that Gar has a lot of respect for my intellect, but I need to remind you that I'm not omniscient," she tried to remind Busara that there were in fact things she wouldn't be aware of, "and I'm mildly ashamed to say that Sub-Saharan African is not exactly my strong point. What, exactly, does Ubuntu/Utu mean?"

"The most direct translation into English would be 'humanness' or 'humanity'," Busara said, in a manner most accommodating to Raven's needs. "In terms of the idea represented, it encourages mutual understanding, reconciliation, mediation, tolerance, good attitudes, and so forth, while discouraging vindication, estrangement, confrontation, cruelty, etc. It also defines justice in restorative, rather than retributive, terms. So, more or less, it's an ideal which encourages compassion and basic human respect."

"Sounds a lot like Gar," Raven stated, as much to herself as to Busara. Those were all qualities that, she had to admit, she'd seen in her green friend for as long as she'd known him—from his immediate and complete acceptance of everyone else on the day they met, in complete disregard of the flaws that had caused them all to be ostracized from society, all the way to the more contemporary hospitality he was showing her and Cyborg. She especially noted that, for all the overreactions and insults (many of which being more playful, but she had to admit there were occasionally some which could be construed as malicious) she had thrown his way over the years, she could only think of _one_ time in which he'd shown any real form of rage toward her—when he was under the influence of the chemicals which caused the first corporeal appearance of the Beast.

"Kweli had a small influence on Garfield, and large influence on Tawaba," Busara explained, "who, in turn, had a lot of influence on Garfield." Busara paused for a moment, apparently recalling something. "There was another reason for Kweli's positive interest in Gar, although I'm not entirely sure of the specifics. It had something to do with Gar's morphing abilities. Upper Lamumba has its own religion, distinct from any of the faiths of other Swahili-speaking peoples. It's heavily based on nature worship, so it's certainly possible that Kweli saw Gar's morphing powers as a sign of divinity, or something along those lines."

As she directed her eyes back toward the screen, Raven saw a sight which made her feel apprehensive to say the least. It was apparently night time, but it seemed the village was having a great celebration of some sort, and Garfield was alone until Mobu approached him. The shaman said something, apparently in a successful effort to entice the boy to go with him. As they left the village, they were joined by two white men, who, Busara informed Raven, were treasure hunters and thieves. "Mobu promised them he'd show them the location of the legendary city of Majumbamawe and its treasure-filled temples if they killed Garfield."

Raven was immediately shocked by the revelation. How could a supposed holy man ever go to the point of conspiring to _kill_ a **child** just because of some petty worries about declining influence? Raven's emotions were beginning to go crazy again: Timid was terrified, Happy's smile had faded, Brave's head was down, and Rage was muttering about how worthless and excuse for a sentient being Mobu was. But she knew that the green boy would ultimately survive this close encounter with death, so she focused on the object of a bit of curiosity instead. "Majumbamawe?"

"It's an ancient city," Busara said, "or, at least it's supposed to be. The legend is that Majumbamawe was the capital of a pre-colonial kingdom of the same name, which encompassed all of present-day Lamumba, as well as large areas of surrounding territories. The legend also tells that Tawabas ancestors were the Kings of Majumbamawe. However, the Europeans never set eyes on the city—the prevailing wisdom is that it never existed, but the legend says that when the Europeans arrived, the leadership of the kingdom knew from the experiences of other peoples what was going to happen, and chose to abandon the city and allow the jungle to reclaim it in order to protect the priceless treasures kept in its palaces and temples." It appeared, from the way Busara was talking, that Garfield himself wasn't certain whether or not the city actually existed.

Mobu had led Garfield and the men into a small tunnel, presumably leading to one of the temples. The corrupt shaman then stopped and demanded that the men fulfill their end of the bargain and kill the boy, refusing to lead them any further if they didn't. They refused, demanding that they be shown the treasure first. The ensuing argument evolved into a physical struggle and Mobu was pushed into one of the tunnel's supports. As the support gave out, the tunnel caved in, killing Mobu and nearly killing Garfield as well, if not for the intervention of the men who were supposed to kill him.

These men, however, were anything but guardian angels. The only reason they took him was because they figured that without the treasure, at least they could try to gain profit from selling him to human traffickers. Before that plan was fulfilled, however, Garfield made the mistake of allowing them to witness him morphing. The men quickly realized what kind of asset this could be and began grooming him to use his morphing powers to infiltrate buildings and stealthily steal valuable items.

The conditions under which Gar was kept were horrifying, however. He was a slave—there was simply no other word for it, and even that word does not seem to carry the appropriate emotional weight. The men subjected the boy to routine physical assaults, beating him with fists and whips, shocking him with shock collars and cattle prongs, and threatening to kill him if he ever even considered going to the police. As Raven saw the unfolding horror, she could not keep her eyes focused on the screen very long. Her human instincts made her feel sick to her stomach upon witnessing such cruelty committed against such an innocent and sweet young child. Her stoic front failed again, as the tears rolled down her cheeks like twin waterfalls. Rage was demanding the men's complete physical and spiritual annihilation—no one should ever do that to _her_ Garfield.

Eventually, the men decided that Africa didn't have enough wealth for their perfect operation, so they smuggled the boy into Europe. The men began sending their little green slave after targets of increasingly high value. By the age of eight, Garfield had quite a track record of robbing some of Europe's most opulent museums and displays.

With greater wealth of pickings, however, fate intervened in the boy's case once again. After having stolen some very expensive items from the Louvre, deliverance from slavery came. His masters were not well equipped to deal with the psychological strain of wealth. Paranoia began to set in—paranoia which was, luckily enough, directed against each other rather than the boy. One night not long after the Louvre heist, the men began to argue with each other—each accusing the other of skimming more than his share from the proceeds. The argument turned to fisticuffs, then weapons were drawn. In the end, the criminals killed each other and Garfield was free.

The boy was able to eventually find his way to the United States Embassy in Paris. After recalling his incredible story to the stunned embassy staff, he requested to be sent back to Tawaba's village in Lamumba. However, given that he was a United States citizen, the State Department was dead set on returning him to the United States. Instead, he was sent to California and placed in the care of a man by the name of Nicholas Galtry.

Galtry was Mark Logan's half-brother and a skilled attorney. However, from first sight, something about him seemed sinister to Raven. He seemed like a cold man, who really didn't care the slightest about Gar. Indeed, he didn't even seem to really know Garfield's name; Galtry called him by the name 'Craig'. But the truly concerning thing was that, while Garfield was in Galtry's care, a series of "accidents" occurred. In each case, Garfield only avoided death by the skin of his teeth. Was the boy the unluckiest child ever to walk the Earth, or was something else going on?

One fateful day, Galtry had taken Gar with him on a business trip to Midway City, Michigan. Here, Garfield once more just barely avoided injury in what would have been a fatal "accident," but this particular incident would change everything. Garfield finally became fed up with Galtry's complete lack of concern for his well-being, so he ran away.

After a couple of days wandering the streets, Gar encountered a building which would forever change his life. Sandwiched in between Slumville and the Downtown Financial District and not far from the MCPD headquarters building, there was a Victorian mansion surrounded on all sides by skyscrapers. Garfield was familiar enough with the famous superheroes of the world to recognize this building: it was the headquarters of the Doom Patrol. At that moment, he decided he would not rest until the Doom Patrol accepted him as a member.

The boy took to the form of a small rodent and snuck into the building. For several days, the team attempted to capture him, as he took multiple forms (including his normal human form). Initially, the Doom Patrol were not too keen on the intruder's presence, but as he proved next to impossible to catch, they quickly gained a large amount of respect for him. They finally capitulated after a few days, but the conversation they had with the boy left them with a problem. His guardian did seem like a very suspicious individual, but Garfield was entrusted to his care by law, so the Doom Patrol had to return him. Nevertheless, Rita, who had quickly taken an almost maternal fondness for the boy, insisted that the team keep an eye on him to ensure his safety.

What the Doom Patrol found during their observations of the situation was horrifying. The "accidents" which had been repeatedly occurring around Garfield during his time with Galtry were no accidents at all. The man had been hiring several hitmen to try to kill the boy. Apparently, Galtry had felt that Mark and Marie's estate rightfully belonged to him, and that "Craig" was in his way. The man had also apparently been embezzling the living allowances Garfield was being paid from the estate. With the evidence they collected, the Doom Patrol were able to send Nicholas Galtry to prison. Soon thereafter, Steve and Rita legally adopted Garfield, welcoming him into the Doom Patrol family.

* * *

**Author's**** Notes****  
**A lot of the details of this chapter were artistic license, albeit presented faithfully to the plot of Gar's past. So, the big picture is still canon, but the small picture not so much. Some of the license was taken to make it fit in better with the story, although in most cases it's there to provide more sharp detail than the original story provided. I've also added new characters (for example, Kweli is an OC I retconned in because he's already been pretty useful to the plot in this chapter, and will probably be quite useful in the future). Majumbamawe is another example of an element I added; the story, as I recall it, was that Mobu was going to show the treasure hunters/thieves the way to get to a temple full of valuable treasure, but I decided to add a lost city to it to give it more dimensions. The important things are generally canon, though. s far as the basic big picture is concerned, at least; again, what I've manufactured tends to be minor details.

This chapter marks the conclusion of the _Passio Eius_ arc of the story. Raven now knows about the tragic things that occurred in Beast Boy's past. So, looking forward, the question is now how that will affect the relationship between the two and how it will affect the development of the story's plot.

I've also made it a point to include instances of Raven attributing possession of Garfield without really realizing it. I.e., thinking of him as _her_ Beast Boy, or _her_ Garfield. This actually began a couple chapters ago, but it's beginning to happen more frequently in this chapter.

_**Hairul The Nightrage Beast-**_Indeed.

_**JasonVUK-**_Yeah, I actually started crying a little myself when I was writing this chapter, particularly the part where Mark was telling Gar to fly away.

_**Annatheavidreader-**_I've had Busara do that with some of the dialogue in this chapter, but none of the earlier Swahili dialogue was so important to warrant Raven needing to really know what was said. I certainly agree that Garfield—as much as the character himself tended to deny it—would almost certainly be psychologically scarred, with a certain tendency toward survivor's guilt (and on top of that his guilt has been portrayed in the comics). Although the survivor's guilt issue is probably going to remain on the back burner as far as this fic goes, until a specific trigger is encountered (I already have a moment in mind, though).


	9. Chapter VIII: Surcease of Sorrow

**Disclaimer: **I once again do not own the Teen Titans.

* * *

**Ascension of the Beast**

**Chapter VIII**

**Surcease of Sorrow**

As Raven's avian aura returned to her corporeal form, she was left with a fairly difficult decision. It was early morning, but, thankfully, Beast Boy was still asleep on the couch, so she wouldn't have to worry about him quite yet. However, her journey into his mind had left her no opportunity to rest herself, and she was quite fatigued. But, on the other hand, what she had seen had left her emotions so messed up that even now it was difficult to keep her eyes from welling up. She could take a nap, but falling asleep with her emotions in turmoil had always proven to be a bad idea. So, ultimately, she _had to_ visit Nevermore.

As the empath made her way to her room, she couldn't keep her mind off her green friend. His past was a complete shock to her—that anyone could maintain a cheery disposition after experiencing all of that was still difficult to wrap her mind around, even though she knew that he was able to do so by segregating his traumatic memories from his conscious mind. To be perfectly honest, however, his past was not the only thing she was thinking about.

As much as she didn't want to admit it, she knew that the preceding night was a turning point and her relationship with the changeling could never be quite the same again. She could no-longer see him as the annoying elf she had thought he was when they were younger. She couldn't see him as weak. She was even beginning to find it difficult to see him as immature. In his past experience and his determination to rise above it, she now realized there was an innate strength and wisdom to him. The scary thing, to her, was that even if she refused to acknowledge the fact, her feelings for him had evolved.

She would _never_ admit it, even to herself, but there was always something about the boy which she found cute. Even from the first day they met, this was the case. It was more than just a physical description—as much as his antics could annoy her, there was always something special about his displays of childlike innocence and the jovial nature he was able to so carefully retain. In the old light, he was like a Peter Pan, desperately trying to find his Neverland. She desperately tried not to smile for him—her own mature side didn't want to encourage his immaturity—but it was exceptionally hard not to smile, or even laugh, at a lot of his antics.

But now he was in a new light. The heroism that was innate in him even when he was a six year old rescuing his mother from certain death; that same heroic nature which manifested itself even in his most feared transformation, when it rescued Raven herself. That heroic nature belied his unspoken maturity. As did his compassionate nature—in his Beast transformation, Garfield was probably the Titan second (to Raven herself) most capable of destruction, but he chose to just let abuses against himself slide, because he always found value in the humanity of others, even if they were asses to him. That same compassion was also what made him worry so deeply for her during the incident with Malchior; all of the other Titans figured she would want to be left alone, but he _knew_ that it wouldn't be right and that she _needed_ someone. His leadership skills and desire for mediation and reconciliation were also exemplifying his hidden maturity; indeed, Raven was beginning to recall incidents where hindsight was making him wonder if he had mediated some disputes by intentionally turning both parties against himself in order to distract them from their disputes with one another.

She couldn't see him as a boy anymore—it was now quite clear that he was a _man_. Of course, emotional maturity was not the only thing which would cause her to review that consideration. Physically, there was no longer much of a child to him. Sure, at eighteen, he wasn't really in his final form yet, but he was by far more man than minor. She could no longer consider him cute, actually. He wasn't _cute_—as much as she would incessantly deny it to herself, he had somehow become _sexy_. It certainly didn't hurt that, on top of his great humane mentality, he was almost dripping with shear animal magnetism in the physical realm.

As she grabbed the handle of the ornate hand mirror, she had a brief second thought. She was feeling very drowsy and didn't know whether or not she would be able to remain conscious long enough to make her rounds with all of her emoticlones. But a nightmare is never a pleasant thing for the person experiencing it, and when a demon was the one having the nightmare, it wasn't pleasant for anyone in the vicinity either. She decided she'd most certainly not want to add further trauma to Garfield's mind. Without a further thought, she lifted the mirror and looked at her reflection, until a black hand reached through and pulled her into her own mindscape.

Picking herself up, Raven rubbed her eyes and let out a yawn. She was again beginning to second guess her decision to enter Nevermore. She was now fairly sure that she would not be able to make it out of her mindscape before she fell asleep—she could only hope that she didn't fall asleep in the realm of Rage. Or Brave, or Rude, or Happy, for that matter, seeing as Brave and Rude were probably the only ones who would dare prank her as she slept (Brave was a little too brave sometimes and Rude just didn't care what Raven's reaction would be), and waking up to Happy's irritatingly sweet and joyful disposition was not something Raven wanted to deal with right now. Though, given the present state of Nevermore, she probably wouldn't have to worry.

It wasn't much of a surprise that the first portal she came to led her to Timid's maze. That was pretty much standard operating procedure in the realm of Nevermore, anyway. What did shock her, however, was the torrential rain pouring down upon the maze, and the two feet of water which stood on the ground inside. "Hmm," she looked around with a concerned look in eye, but still maintained a monotone voice, "this is new." In all of her experience within Nevermore, she had _never_ observed rain before. "I don't know what's going on here, but I'm going to find out."

As she began to make her way deeper into the waterlogged maze, she could faintly hear the sound of very heavy sobs. She had no doubt as to who the crying entity was—after all, this was very much the gray-cloaked emoticlone's forte. As she waded forth, she eventually came upon a sight which at once confirmed her assumptions about the identity of the source of the crying, yet also shocked her to the core. Timid was the weepy, scared, continuously self-conscious emotion who represented the most depressive aspects of Raven's emotional being, but she had never, since the day Raven left Azarath, been this bad. Here she found her submissive double sitting in the fetal position, with the only thing keeping her from sliding completely beneath the surface of the water being that she was propped up with her shoulder against the wall. All the while, Timid was crying harder than Raven had ever seen before—hard enough that she could not speak; indeed, hard enough that she would probably have suffocated already if she were a corporeal being living in the real world.

Normally, Raven tend to be annoyed by Timid, and under normal circumstances she would have found herself even more so still. But after all she had seen when she was within Beast Boy's mindscape, she knew that this reaction was actually quite reasonable under the circumstances. So, instead of feeling frustration, the normally stoic dark empath felt compassion. Instead of mumbling derogatory insults about Timid's lack of composure, she sat with the emotion and drew her into an embrace. "Timid," she said in a sweet, almost maternal voice as the grey-cloaked emoticlone cried on her shoulder, "it's going to be alright. We know what he's been through now. I'll help him."

In the warmth of the embrace, Timid's crying began to subside, and so too with it did the rain. "W-Why d-did it all h-have to happen to h-him?" Timid said in a voice that sounded eerily like a child who had just been told some horrible news.

"I don't know," Raven answered with full honesty. "Sometimes fate can be so cruel. But I need you to be strong, so I can be there for him. Okay?"

"Okay," Timid nodded, as she swept the tears from her eyes. "I'm sorry I haven't been strong," she said in her normal nervous voice. "It was just so horrible I didn't know what e-else to do bu-ut c-c-c-cry," Timid's eyes were threatening to well up again.

"It's okay, Timid," Raven said, still maintaining the sweet voice with which she had been speaking, "you're who you are, it's kind of your thing." She paused for a moment before asking the gray-cloaked double of herself a question. "How have the others been taking it?"

"Happy hasn't smiled since we saw what happened to his parents, and she sunk into depression when it became clear that his parents' death wasn't the last traumatic experience Gar had," Timid said as her composure strengthened a little. Her voice was still in a very meek tone, but that was normal for her—at least it was stable and she wasn't studdering now. "Rage and Brave want to find Galtry and subject him to scaphism, and then resurrect Mobu and the criminals who enslaved Gar, just so they can send them back to the afterlife in greater agony. Affection has been alternating between crying as hard as I was and joining Rage and Brave's calls for vengeance. Knowledge has locked herself in the library, trying to analyze _everything_. Wisdom has been second-guessing herself and wondering how she never saw the pain..."

"Haven't there been any of you who weren't affected by this?" Raven interrupted. The course of action proposed by Rage and Brave was certainly alluring, but going through each emotion's response was costing time. She figured it would probably save more time to look at it in the reverse. Ultimately, she was right. Timid shook her head in reply. They'd _all_ been affected.

"We all like him," Affection caused both Raven and Timid to jump, having been unnoticed in her approach. "It hurt us all to see Gar enduring so much pain, so much anguish, so much hardship. He never did anything to deserve any of it and, though we haven't held council yet, I'm willing to bet the consensus among us is that we want to do whatever we can to help him."

"That's actually why I'm here," Raven replied. "If I'm going to be helpful to Gar in any way, I'm going to need rest. I'm not going to be able to get even a catnap if all of you are in turmoil. And to add to that, even if by some miracle I did get some rest, I can't help him if I'm not thinking clearly." Raven expressed her apprehensions freely, as Wisdom quietly joined the group.

"Don't worry about getting us in order," the newcomer said. "Since you've already consoled Timid to the point where _she_ is no-longer crying, the rest of us should be returning to a quasi-normal state shortly. Take a nap, then go to him. We won't be a problem for you." Wisdom paused for a moment before adding something else. "And you should probably get him out of the house tonight. Go do something you think he'd enjoy doing; it'll do a lot toward restoring order here if we can see him happy. Besides, if you don't get him out of the house, he'll just go back to his fruitless obsession with Lamumba."

"I'm not so sure anymore that it's a bad thing for him to be concerned with what's going on over there," said Raven. "He spent such an important part of his life there, his parents died there, and King Tawaba was one of his first great mentors. He should want to do something."

"I'm not saying that it's unreasonable to want to do something," Wisdom replied. "But he can't do anything about it alone, which is why his recent behavior is unhealthy. If he truly wants to do something, he'll need a team. He's never going to get a team together if he keeps himself in isolation."

Raven couldn't argue with Wisdom's logic, but the idea of dragging Garfield out of the house to do something he'd like was questionable for a simple reason: she probably wouldn't like it so much. Going to a crowded arcade when her emotions were in an unstable state was not exactly something she considered a good idea—she had gained a lot of control of her powers over the years, but they were still based on her emotions, and she still lost control every now and then when under stress. But she knew Wisdom was right; if she didn't see a smile on Gar's face, her emotions would remain in turmoil.

As she approached the Forbidden Gate, she decided that, while Wisdom was right and it had to be something Gar would like, she had to have some limitations. First, it could not be an arcade—the crowding, the abrasive sounds of all the games being played—these things would stress her out and possibly endanger everyone around her. Secondly, it should be somewhere without much lighting; that way, if she began to lose control, she could slip away and find someplace to hide. At the intersection of these two rules, Raven found two worthy possibilities. She highly doubted that going to a movie theater would do much to get his mind off from things, so she decided to rule that out. With the cinema eliminated as an option, Raven made a decision as to where she would drag her friend that night—though it certainly irked her.

Returning to her bedroom, Raven set her alarm clock to wake her up after two hours and promptly collapsed onto her bed. The nap would not be as refreshing as a full eight hours, but it could give her enough rest to keep going until late in the night. As she lost consciousness, the last thought on her mind was of Garfield Mark Logan.

* * *

As Raven awoke to the sound of her alarm, it took a moment for the events of the previous night and her mission for the day to flood her mind. "I should probably meditate," she said to herself, before shaking the idea off. "No, I need to talk to him. I can meditate after talking to him," she strengthened her resolve to take care of the matter. Time was a factor now. "I could use some tea, though."

As she made her way toward the kitchen, she decided to check the great room to see if Beast Boy was still asleep on the couch. He wasn't, but she was pretty sure she could guess where he was. _'The study'_, she thought in response to the unasked question. She was hoping she could get to him before he returned to his fortress of obsessive brooding. Obviously she lost that race.

As she entered the kitchen and pot her kettle on the burner, she realized she had no idea what to say to him at any rate. How does one speak to someone about things that happened a decade earlier, especially if the person does not even want to remember those things? _'Perhaps I shouldn't talk to him about those memories. I can't blame him for not wanting to recall those memories—they hurt _me_, and they weren't even my memories'_, she thought as she fixed her tea and took a seat in the dining room.

As she sat at the table, drinking her tea, the silence was deafening. The whole time she had lived at the Tower, she hated all of the noise everyone else would make. She absolutely hated it when the others would interrupt her meditation, or her thoughts, or her reading with their arguments, games and antics. She especially despised how Beast Boy would always pester her, but now was very different. Now it was the silence that was getting to her. Now she would give anything for her annoying little elf to interrupt her thoughts and tell her some terrible joke.

She especially hated seeing him like this. In the past, he had annoyed her, but—although she'd never admit it—his bright disposition had also been a comfort to her. His cheesy jokes always told her that everything would be alright, and his goofy smile could inspire hope on the most vital of moments. Moreover, his stubborn determination absolutely astonished her; he probably was the only person she'd ever met who was as stubborn as she was, and, although that could create a lot of friction between the two, it was a quality that made her feel like she wasn't alone. She wanted that Garfield Logan back; she _needed_ to her Beast Boy. It had been ages since she'd seen his goofy grin, or heard him crack a cheesy joke, or seen the hope in his eyes, and for the love of Azar, this tendency to obsess on Lamumba had caused him to neglect his prior stubborn mission with regard to her (not that she was being selfish in her thinking here—rather, the fact that he was no longer trying to make her smile was a definite sign that something was very wrong).

Preferring not to waste any more time, Raven left the dining room as soon as she finished her tea, quickly finding herself in the hallway, standing before the door leading into the study. For five minutes, she would knock on the door and wait briefly for a response. Even as her knocks grew louder, each knock she dealt went unanswered. A combination of impatience and concern ultimately overtook her, and she chose to let herself in.

Her eyes first met the desk—it was empty. However, she quickly discovered Gar sitting on a small couch with a bottle in his hand, staring at the flat screen television he'd set up in the room. Raven couldn't be sure whether he even knew she was there at the moment. If he did, he surely did not let it on; indeed, his eyes hadn't even shifted toward her. As she closed the distance between herself and her green friend, she noticed that the bottle in his hand was a half-empty bottle of Wild Turkey Rare Breed; sitting alone drinking Bourbon did not typically bode well for the mental state of a superhero, let alone one who wasn't even legally of age to drink yet. _'Where on Earth did he get that?'_ thought Raven, after the initial shock of seeing Garfield in this most depressing state wore off.

As she took a seat next to him, his eyes still made no movement to suggest that he even knew she was there; his gaze remained on the television unbroken, an eerie despair to it which she'd never seen in him before. Worried about her friend, Raven turned her attention to the television and, soon enough, it all made sense. The situation in Lamumba had changed drastically over the course of the previous twelve hours. First, dissident militias in Lower Lamumba's three northernmost districts clashed openly with government troops, after the regime attempted to seize armories in the area. The country was now openly in civil war.

But the shit hit the fan even harder in Upper Lamumba. Over the past six hours, there had been violent clashes between local militias and government troops in every one of Upper Lamumba's seven districts. But it was the reason for these clashes that particularly explained Garfield's disposition at the moment—these clashes were in reaction to the discovery of the corpses of Upper Lamumba's royal family.

"I wish I wasn't so worthless," Garfield said, finally addressing Raven's presence before taking a swig from his bottle. "You saw what happened with my parents—if I had been smarter, I could have saved them. I could have saved Tawaba and his family too—if I'd have just gone and talked to him when I heard about the coup, I could have convinced him to take his family into exile for his and their safety, but like a complete idiot I just sat here." He sighed before continuing his self-abusive diatribe. "I could have saved my parents if only I tried harder. Their death was all my fault. I could have saved Tawaba and is family—the people who took me in after my parents died and treated me like one of their own—too, but again I'm too much of a failure. Mento was right when he blamed me for letting the Brain go, Robin was right when he didn't trust me during the whole Beast incident, and you've been right all along—all I am is a stupid freak who always seems to screw _everything_ up. I don't even deserve to live."

Raven reacted impulsively to his last six words, slapping him across the face with as much physical strength as she could muster. "Don't you _ever_ say or think that _again_!" she exclaimed in a tone which simultaneously emoted anger and concern. "I did see what happened when your parents died—there was absolutely _nothing_ you could have done about it; it wasn't your fault! Tawaba and his family aren't you fault either—you didn't know that Kibwana was going to kill them! Mento himself later admitted that he was wrong. And as for Dick," she paused for a moment trying to phrase it in a way that wasn't to hard on the Boy Wonder, but she had to be honest. "Dick is one of my closest friends, but sometimes he can be a complete asshole who rushes to judgment without having all of the information, and that was one of those times. I mean, come on Gar! You saved my life that night!" Her voice softened considerably as she finished what she was saying. "If you don't deserve to live, I don't know who does. I wouldn't be here right now if it wasn't for you, and neither would Dick, nor Mento, and let's not forget all of the civilians you've saved. Just because you're not omniscient doesn't mean your life has any less meaning. In fact, you know how rare it is for me to say something like this, but your life has a lot more value to me than you'll ever realize."

"I don't know," Beast Boy replied. "I mean...I _know_ you're right—everything you're saying makes total sense. But I still can't help _feeling_ like this is all my fault. And, you know, I want to do something to help the people who are still there in Lamumba—to help them end Kibwana's tyranny—but I don't even know what I can do. I'm just..." he would never finish the sentence, as he broke into tears at that moment. Raven pulled him into an embrace and let him cry on her shoulder.

"Gar, I have a story I need to tell you I know you probably don't think it will help, but just hear me out," she said, almost whispering in his ear. Garfield raised his head and looked her in the eye to signify that she had his attention, but did not otherwise interrupt. "Once upon a time, there was a fifteen year old girl who felt like there was no one who truly understood her or with whom she could really bond. So, when she was feeling down about herself, an evil dragon trapped in a book convinced her that he was a good wizard and that he understood her," Raven gave a painful sigh as she was recalling one of her less cherished memories. "She fell in love with the dragon, who promised that they would be together if she freed him; and he taught her all of the black magic she would need to free him. But when she was freeing him, she learned that he had been lying to her and using her the whole time. The girl forced him back into his book, but the experience left her despondent..."

"Rae, I know this story, but I don't really see what Malchior has to do with..."

"Just hear me out," was her simple response. "So, I was left heartbroken and feeling more alone than ever, but I had someone who cared enough to worry about me the whole time the dragon was fooling me. When my heartbreak was so horrible that I couldn't really deal with it, that sweet boy came to me and told me exactly what I needed to hear. He told me 'You think you're alone, Raven, but you're not.'"

"I remember Rae, but I still don't see how that applies to this situation."

"Well, it's rather simple. Just like I thought I was alone then, you think you're alone now. But just like you were there for me then, I'm here for you now," she tightened the embrace slightly as she paused. "You think you're alone, Garfield, but you're not."

"I appreciate it Rae, but I can't ask you..."

"Gar, you're not asking me, _I'm telling you_. I've seen your past, I know that you need to do something, and by Azar I swear that I will be by your side the entire way. You don't need to brood alone; we can act together."

* * *

**Author's Notes**  
The title of this chapter is taken from a phrase used in the fourth line of the second verse of _The Raven_. I decided to use a title which references Poe's poem for obvious reasons, and the phrase "surcease of sorrow" also fits the general theme of the chapter, both with Raven's effort to bring her own emotions under control and to be there for Beast Boy.

I don't want to spoil much on what's to follow, but next chapter will reveal some important plot points and focus on Cyborg's meeting in New York, and then the next chapter after that will see another important BBRae moment. After that, the chapters ahead will gradually introduce one hell of a cast of characters (some of whom, while being characters who exist or have existed in the larger DC universe, would not normally be expected to make an appearance in a Teen Titans fic...but in most cases these characters will have an association of some sort with someone who's already in the story, so they're not going to be just randomly dropped in), as well as gradually revealing bits and pieces of the plot.

Also, on a random unrelated note, there probably will be **_waaaaay_** too many romantic pairings in this story (it's very much subject to change, but at the moment I'm counting at least twenty romantic pairings that I want to either display, mention, acknowledge or allude to in this story). A little excessive, but many of the romantic pairings in this story will be absolutely vital to setting up some of the later sequels I've got in mind. For example, this is definitely a spoiler, but Mar'i Grayson is one character I want to see having a role in some of the sequels.

_**Annatheavidreader-**_I figured that, given Raven's demonic origins, the development of deeper feelings toward Garfield would necessarily begin with her unconsciously taking a possessive view toward him. I don't want to spoil much, but this will periodically get a little interesting in a few moments in chapters ahead.

_**Hairul The Nightrage Beast-**_Without a doubt. In an attrition situation, Beast Boy could probably outlast just about anyone. But I doubt it would even come down to attrition—he has some pretty serious capabilities. I mean, just to use a few examples from the cartoons alone: he made Slade show fear and held his own in one-on-one combat against him in "Betrayal," he made Robin (the f'ing highly-trained protege of the Dark Knight, mind you) flinch in "The Beast Within," he inflicted serious enough physical pain upon Trigon the Terrible that it made the demon lord cry in pain in "The End, Part 2," there's pretty much the entirety of "Titans Together," etc. Then when you get into the comics, one of his problems is that he's actually _too_ strong; he can be pretty dangerous in his more powerful transformations. For example, he (in the form of a chimera) accidentally **_killed_** Madame Rouge in the comics, which ended up leading to her daughter, Gemini, coming after him in search of revenge years later (but, with the help of Bette Kane, Gar made it through that whole ordeal). If the situation calls for it and the threat is serious enough to make him forget about his inhibitions, Garfield can probably be regarded as the second (only to Raven) most dangerous Titan.

_**JasonVUK-**_Not in this chapter, but maybe later.


	10. Chapter IX: National Security

**Disclaimer:** I must once again disclaim that I do not, in any way, shape, or form, own the Teen Titans.

* * *

**Ascension of the Beast**

**Chapter IX**

**National Security**

To say that Cyborg was in a good mood would have been the understatement of the century. S.T.A.R. Labs had sent him on an expense-paid trip to New York for the weekend, and, although it was technically a work trip, the meetings he needed to attend would likely only take up a few hours of his time. This left him with ample time of his own while he was in the Big Apple. On top of that, he had been able to spend most of the preceding evening with one of his favorite people, and would be keeping company with her once more as soon as his meeting for the day was over.

Victor could not ignore how special Sarah Simms was to him. She was among the first people who saw him for the man he was, rather the prostheses which had been forced upon him by fate. She treated him like a human being rather than recoiling in fear as if he were some sort of anthropomorphic robot. Indeed, as a testament to her humanity, even her students automatically recognized him as a man. The basic respect and kindness she showed toward him was only paralleled by the Titans; indeed, on this matter she really reminded him of his friend Garfield Logan—the younger Titan had been among the first people since his accident who, without even thinking about it, automatically saw him as a human being.

It should not be of much surprise that Gar would become his best friend. Sarah, however, was much more. On top of treating him like a man and being kind to him, she was a woman—and a beautiful one at that. The blue-eyed blonde had been one of just three women for whom he'd really shared the sort of bond which might lead to romance; the other two being metahumans themselves. Now, since Jinx was with Kid Flash and Bumblebee was with Herald, Cyborg could concentrate on what factors made Sarah special, and he ultimately had to conclude that the fact that she could understand him without needing to live the kind of life he lived made her all the more remarkable. He knew he was falling, and he knew it was hard. But, for now, that would have to wait—the man Victor Stone had business to attend to.

He had been told that New York was chosen because it afforded the unique combination of being somewhat neutral ground—the WHO had its headquarters in Geneva, the CDC had its headquarters in the Atlanta metro area, and S.T.A.R. Labs had its headquarters in Metropolis—which also had all of the amenities and access to offices which would be necessary. S.T.A.R. Labs' New York location had been chosen in particular, which Cyborg thought was somewhat odd considering the center in New York primarily dealt with research and technology, while this was a matter of disease control. Either way, these thoughts left his mind as he crossed the threshold of the meeting room.

Unsurprisingly, there were obvious representatives of the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in attendance (Victor was himself working as S.T.A.R. Labs' primary representative at the meeting). What raised his suspicions, however, was the presence of a number of individuals who did not really strike him as medical professionals. As the introductions were made, his suspicions that these were not WHO or CDC officers were confirmed.

A temporary assistant S.T.A.R. Labs had appointed for Victor for the day introduced the various individuals in attendance. In addition to himself, there were representatives of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, the FBI Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. The presence of representatives from a large portion of the U.S. Intelligence Community made him curious, but he opted not to ask—if they wanted him to know why they were here, they'd tell him, and it was best not to ask if they didn't want him to know. But he had a stinging suspicion that his security clearance—all of the Jump City and Steel City Titans had to obtain TS security clearances when the government contracted them for a job a couple years earlier—was going to be invoked at some point during this meeting.

Initially, the meeting went pretty much as Cyborg had been previously expecting. Dr. Judith Xylander, the representative of the WHO, did most of the talking, with some input from Dr. Benjamin Connell of the CDC. They explained the mechanisms of how the virus acted and the apparent ability of non-human animals to survive infection with no ill effects. They caught his attention when they explained that the disease was endemic to Upper Lamumba, but it was when they explained the symptoms that he suddenly had an idea of why _he_ had been chosen for this job.

"Almost immediately upon transmission, the skin in the vicinity of the bite will begin to take a greenish pigment. Within minutes, as the immune system mobilizes to attempt to counteract the virus, a high fever will begin to develop," said Dr. Xylander. "As the disease progresses into its later stages, and the virus spreads throughout the body, the green pigment initially observed at the site of the initial wound will become systemic, affecting the tone of the skin, hair and pupils. Notably, however, the discoloration will not extend to the palate, bodily fluids or any internal organs." Xylander paused for a moment. "Throughout the recorded history of the disease, its mortality rate among humans has always been one-hundred percent; with a single exception."

"Garfield Logan?" Cyborg guessed. Beast Boy's recent obsession with Lamumba was bad enough that he had to have had some sort of connection to the country. And his skin, hair and eye color were too much to really ignore. Ultimately, the answer would come from the INR representative.

"Indeed," replied Matt Breckenridge, the representative of the State Department's Office of Intelligence and Research. "A decade ago, a young boy—Mr. Logan—showed up at the embassy in Paris. He had been through quite a string of traumatic experiences during the preceding three years, but the important part of it is that he contracted Sakutia in Upper Lamumba when he was five years old."

"Mr. Logan's parents, Mark and Marie, were scientists working under the employ of S.T.A.R. Labs," Dr. Xylander added. "Together with their colleague, Dr. Samuel Register, they studied Sakutia in the hopes of finding a cure for the disease. Unfortunately, Garfield contracted Sakutia during that time. Mark Logan labored tirelessly to develop a serum to save his son's life. Fortunately, the serum worked."

"So, why do I need to develop a vaccine if there's already a serum that'll cure the disease?" asked the confused ex-Titan.

"Well, there's two problems with the serum," replied the WHO rep. "First of all, we don't really know what Dr. Logan actually did. He apparently worked solo to create this serum, and, well..." Xylander paused for a moment due to the gravity of what happened, "Mark and Marie Logan died later died in a boating accident."

"Moreover," Agent Ulysses Webb, the representative of the CIA who was present, cut in, "the serum is believed to be the source of Garfield Logan's powers. Ever since the whole fiasco with the Everyman Project, we're trying to avoid anything which could give metahuman powers to non-metahumans as best we can. And Mr. Logan could, if he wanted, be a very serious threat; the only reason he is not is because of his personality. If someone with less positive intentions were to have his powers, the consequences could be dire."

"Which is why we've found that it's better to vaccinate in order to prevent infection in the first place than to try to replicate the Logan serum," Xylander added. "On the bright side, we believe the serum's effects may have given Mr. Logan the ability to produce Sakutia antibodies, which very well could be used to produce a viable vaccine."

"On the bright side? What's the bad news, then?" Cyborg knew there had to be more to the story and gave the Intelligence Community reps a prompt to fill him in if possible.

"Before we continue, it must be made clear that everything which will be said beyond this point in this conversation is classified Top Secret," Agent Webb confirmed Cyborg's prior suspicions. "You may speak of these matters with any of your direct S.T.A.R. Labs superiors who happen to have TS clearance, and you may speak of them with Mr. Logan and Ms. Roth," it was apparent that the CIA was aware of the living situation, "but under _no_ circumstances are you to communicate these matters to _anyone_ else. This is a matter of national security, and any indiscretion beyond what's been explicitly permitted will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"CIA operatives working in Lamumba have uncovered evidence that Kibwana is receiving funding from private sources in the United States. We do not know precisely _who_ these sponsors are, but the money trail seems to lead to Metropolis and Gotham." Agent Webb paused. "So far these sponsors have been extremely careful to cover their tracks, but what we do know is that they are trading financial support in exchange for the Kibwana regime's aid and blessing in the development of a new biological weapons program. They are attempting to weaponize Sakutia."

"But, that's crazy!" Cyborg said with a seriously concerned look on his face. "Sakutia is spread from fluid contact; they can't weaponize it without some serious genetic engineering..."

"Which is why they've hired him," Webb replied while laying a photo of a man in a lab coat before the half-cybernetic twenty-something. "That would be Dr. Samuel Register. The same Dr. Samuel Register who worked beside the Logans all those years ago." The CIA agent paused to gauge Cyborg's reaction, which demonstrated appropriate shock through the silence. "Register has the skills necessary to modify the virus _and_ probably has more experience working with it than anyone else in his field."

"This is why it is imperative, Mr. Stone, that you produce a vaccine as soon as possible," added Captain Marcel Braddack, the DIA's representative in the meeting. "If Register can produce a version of this virus which can be contract via airborne exposure, it can be put into artillery shells and warheads, not to mention improvised explosives and bombs. This virus poses the potential to spark a doomsday event if it's weaponized. We need especially to vaccinate soldiers sooner than they can produce Sakutia munitions, as, the moment we receive actionable intelligence that such munitions have been produced and are field-worthy, we're going to have to send in troops to destroy them."

"Though, we hope it may not need to come to that," added Webb.

"Zuberi Kiongzi, the deposed Prime Minister of Lamumba who now leads the Lamumban government-in-exile, has been asking some interesting questions about Mr. Logan," Breckenridge rejoined the conversation.

"What kind of questions?" asked Cyborg, both out of curiosity and concern for his friend.

"Mr. Kiongzi is more than aware of the _great_ Beast Boy," replied Breckenridge, with a hint of sarcasm in his voice in using the appellation 'great'. "He is idolized in Lamumba—especially Upper Lamumba. Around hearths and campfires throughout Upper Lamumba, people tell stories to their children about the exploits of Mnyama (as they call him). Being a superhero who was a member of two of the most important teams of superheroes in the world is enough to get one recognized, but Logan gets special attention in Lamumba because, after his parents died, King Tawaba took him in and basically adopted him as his own. Since Kibwana killed the entire Upper Lamumban royal family, that actually leaves Mr. Logan as the closest thing in existence to a legitimate claimant to that throne."

"I know operatives who are working in Lamumba," Webb added. "Recently, the conversations about Logan have taken on an almost messianic tone. Apparently, even people in Lower Lamumba are beginning to talk about how the great king Mnyama will deliver them all from Kibwana's tyranny and initiate the rebirth of Lamumban civilization."

"So, to answer your question," Breckenridge spoke once more, "Kiongzi is wondering if Mr. Logan will go to Lamumba and help topple Kibwana's regime. Of course, if he were to do so, that would save a lot of headaches with regard to the Sakutia issue, so don't expect the United States to oppose him if he chooses to do so."

"Langley would like to know if he's going to go, though," added Webb.

"As would the Pentagon," Braddack noted.

"And, of course, Foggy Bottom will need to know as well," spoke Breckenridge.

"And, if he finds any information as to who the American sponsors are, the FBI would be more than interested," added Special Agent Louisa Courtenay, the FBI's representative to the meeting.

The rest of the meeting was far less interesting—basically, an exchange of contact information, so that everyone would be in the loop about new developments. As he left the meeting, Cyborg thought about his friend, wondering how Beast Boy would react to all of this new information, and whether he would want to go to Lamumba. Little did Victor know that, across the country, the die had pretty much already been cast.

* * *

**Author's Notes  
**Who do you think the mystery sponsors will be?

Quite a few original characters in this chapter, but I don't think they'll be making re-appearances.

Oh, and the importance of Garfield's connection to Tawaba has now skyrocketed.

_**Hairul The Nightrage Beast-**_Berserker...funny thing you should choose that term, as that's pretty much what I see him as in the form too. No concern whatsoever for his own personal safety, just an overwhelming desire to fulfill whatever his particular end might be (which, in _every_ case where the Beast made an appearance in the cartoon, ended up being a very emphatic "**protect/save Raven**"), by any means necessary. Incidentally, I do have a particular mythological creature I've never seen BB transforming into in any media that I do eventually want to write him transforming into, but that'll probably be more towards the story's climax.

_**Annatheavidreader-**_Yeah, I'm feeling a need to really explore what I can of the pallet of characters DC has to offer. I'll spoil one example of someone who is not a Titan but will have a relatively important supporting role, though, seeing as she won't be much of a surprise anyway: Zatanna Zatara, who will be making her entrance into the story sometime within the next few chapters.

_**JasonVUK-**_Glad you liked it. Though, the next few chapters probably won't have as many tearjerk moments as the previous few did.


	11. Chapter X: By Any Other Name

**Disclaimer:** It should go without saying at this point, but I need to say it. I do not own, nor have I ever owned the Teen Titans.

* * *

**Ascension of the Beast**

**Chapter X**

**By Any Other Name**

"Eh," interjected Beast Boy, "the last time I tried to do something like this and didn't invite Duela, she got so offended that she crashed the party with a group of villains, just to get revenge for being left out. So I think we should probably invite her just so _that_ doesn't happen again."

In the hours since Raven had literally slapped the changeling out of his funk, the two of them had actually been creating a plan regarding how they were going to do something about Lamumba. During the duration of the car ride they were now in the midst of, the two had been discussing possible active, reserve and honorary Titans whose assistance they could request.

Raven considered making a sarcastic crack at Beast Boy's lack of principles, but upon thinking of her own past interactions with Duela Dent, she realized and simultaneously replied "yeah, that's probably a good idea." The Titans knew next to nothing about the sometimes heroine/sometimes villain who variously (and dubiously) claimed to be the daughter of either the Joker or Harvey Dent, but there was a predictable pattern to her actions. Duela's primary motivation in life seemed to be working with the Titans. If the Titans included her in something, she would be happy enough and do her part. If, however, she felt excluded by the Titans, she had a tendency to act out. Whatever the girl's origins were, she often seemed to be absolutely insane; but, unlike the terrifying supervillain she sometimes claimed was her father, Duela's was an easily-managed insanity.

However, Raven was not particularly keen on planning at this particular moment, during which she should surely have been focusing most of her attention on driving. She may have gotten Garfield out of his funk, but he was still acting a lot more serious than her Beast Boy, and, as much as this Garfield seemed to be an improvement over his normal ever-happy, annoying self, she recognized that his happy-go-lucky attitude was necessary as a part of his defense mechanism against his traumatic memories, and she didn't really want to have to deal with helping him through a nervous breakdown in two or three weeks.

"We should add Bette to the list too," said the changeling, "I think her acrobatic skills and martial arts know-how can really help make up for Rob's absence."

_'Great,'_ Raven thought sarcastically, _'another skinny blonde'_. Gar had _never_ indicated any sort of romantic interest in the Dark Knight's distant cousin. Ever since he had met the blonde, he had shown only a platonic interest in her. But, as far as Raven's suspicious mind was concerned, he didn't have broadcast a romantic interest. He was presently single and, although his romantic history was nearly as short as her own, it was consistent on two counts—both Tara Markov and Jillian Jackson had been natural blondes with thin figures. Her suspicion that he had an eye toward making Bette Kane number three on the list had a strange effect on Raven emotionally. She couldn't (or didn't really want to) identify the precise emotion at play, but it filled her with a cocktail of feelings of inadequacy, sadness and anger, among others; as though Timid and Rage were co-hosting a rave for Nevermore's more negative emotions. Nevertheless, she labored as hard as she could to maintain her stoic presence.

It was becoming an interesting drive, though, as Raven still did not know up from down as far as Los Angeles was concerned. She normally would have let Garfield drive under these conditions, but she chose to keep their destination a secret from him. Also, there was he matter of the alcohol he had ingested earlier in the day; he was pretty sober now—if she had to guess, she would suppose his BAC was probably around .005 to .010 by this point (the experience of having aided the JCPD and CHP on many occasions in the past was paying off in her ability to guess roughly how drunk a person was), which was well below the point of any observable impairment—but as superheroes they were celebrities with role-model status, and it surely would not have gone well for it to be discovered that Beast Boy had consumed _any_ alcohol under the age of 21.

It was becoming clear, however, that it was also a mistake for her to drive—or, more appropriately, to do so whilst Garfield was distracting her. She had consulted Google to get directions to the intended destination—a night club where she was sure Garfield could have fun and she could find someplace to hide in the shadows if necessary. But she was beginning to suspect that she had missed a turn and had ended up off the map she'd printed. Talking and listening to Beast Boy about these plans had divided her attention just enough that it was entirely within the realm of possibility that the turn could have been missed as long as a half hour before.

After another three blocks, she decided to cut her loses and improvise to find a new destination. The restaurant she found another two blocks down the street seemed nice enough from the outside. It appeared to be a small 'mom and pop' place, with a very friendly vibe. However, no sooner did they open their menus than did Beast Boy discover a problem.

"Uh, Rae," he said in a quiet, nervous voice he'd used with her so often before. The same quiet voice he'd use when he was afraid of offending her. She normally would have corrected him that her name was Raven, but, whether it was that she was so relieved to find a sign that her Beast Boy was still in there, or if she had just stopped feeling offended by his use of that particular pet form, she did not even think to do so. "They don't have a vegetarian menu." To be honest, he was afraid of offending her; he didn't know that she'd actually gotten them lost and chosen this restaurant as their destination on the fly, and he certainly didn't want her to feel like he didn't appreciate her bringing him out of the house somewhere.

Raven carefully, but somewhat frantically, searched the menu. _'Great, I've chosen the only restaurant in the Greater Los Angeles Metropolitan Area that doesn't have vegetarian options'_, she thought to herself, after confirming that the changeling was right. Even the salads seemed to be a no-go, as it seemed _all_ of the salads on the menu contained animal products.

"Hello, may I take yo...wait, aren't you Beast Boy and Raven of the Teen Titans?" the waitress said, forgetting the business she was supposed to attend to as soon as she recognized the pair.

"Uh...yeah," Raven said hesitantly, but on the inside she was thinking _'nooooo, I'm Santa Clause and he's my elf'_. "And I think we're ready to order," she added, which immediately elicited a questioning look from her verdant companion. "We'll take two Caesar salads, but hold the egg yolks in both. He'll have a Coke, and I'll have tea," she said in an assertive tone. The look on Beast Boy's face silently communicated his approval—he'd spent much of the past four years trying to show her that he knew her better than she thought, now it was her turn.

"Would you like any chicken with that?" asked the waitress, apparently unaware of Beast Boy's notoriously vegan diet. It was more understandable that she would be ignorant of Raven's own vegetarianism, considering even most of the Titans never seemed to notice that she didn't eat meat. Beast Boy appeared, in fact, to be the only one, although that gave him an open door to offer her tofu on several occasions, which she always turned down because the fake meat was too much like real meat in its form. Besides, she preferred a natural diet; she didn't need vegetable matter that had been processed to resemble animal matter, when she could just eat fruits and vegetables that looked like damn fruits and vegetables.

"No," both Titans answered, as politely as the single-word response could be uttered. It took special effort for Raven. _'No, I just took five minutes trying to decide upon a meat-free option because I wanted meat'_ she thought to herself as her eye began to twitch subtly. She was trying really hard not to show what she was thinking, though, as she was sure that this poor waitress was probably being paid less than minimum wage, and she had to admit that she would herself not be entirely present if she were in the waitress's position either.

Barely a moment after the waitress left with their order, Beast Boy momentarily excused himself to make use of the restroom—they had been driving around for quite a while before they arrived at the restaurant, and nature was bound to call eventually. Raven did not consciously register as her attention focused on her companion as he walked away, and the lapse in her awareness of her surroundings allowed someone else to take a seat next to her without her noticing.

"Hey, Raven," said the visitor, to which Raven's immediate response was to recoil in shock; the shock also causing her powers to detonate a salt shaker which had theretofore been sitting on the table. The person in the seat next to Raven was a white-haired and blue-eyed young female who stood approximately 5'4" in height and weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of 115 pounds. Luckily for said individual, Raven instantly recognized her as the shock wore off.

"Rose," the dark empath said in a tone which belied her irritation. "You should _never_ sneak up on me," she added in a mildly threatening tone, which communicated the general idea of 'I'll spare you for now, but you're not going to like the consequences if you ever do it again'. In all honesty, Raven had a little bit of a soft spot for Rose, considering an eerie piece of common ground they shared. Trigon the Terrible and Slade Wilson, two of the Titans' worst enemies, each only had a single daughter—Raven and Rose, respectively.

In spite of their villainous fathers, both girls ended up becoming capable and loyal Titans, even if Raven tended to isolate herself socially and Rose, who had chosen to remain in the reserve column of the Titans' organization in spite of being invited to join the Jump City team full time, tended to isolate herself professionally, working as a mercenary for hire to various governments who needed temporary protection from metahuman threats. Also, each of them had managed to develop unlikely friendships with green, shape-shifting Titans, who both had a tendency to unintentionally irritate them in the course of failed attempts at being humorous.

Of course, there were some significant differences between Raven and Rose. Raven was a demi-demoness whose skill in using dark powers typically precluded the need for physical combat, while Rose primarily relied upon her skill in physical combat, being a martial artist on the same strength level as her father and Dick Grayson. But a more immediately important difference was that, while Raven's empathic powers permitted her to know what emotions most people were feeling, Rose went a bit further in being able to get inside of others' heads. The fifth Ravager was by this point every bit as capable of reading people as her father was, and what she was reading in Raven before she knew Rose was there was quite interesting.

"So," the white-haired girl began, "what's new with you and BB?" Rose's face bore a mischievous smirk; she was not a core Titan, but she knew Raven well enough to know that she wouldn't stare holes through someone in whom she'd only had a platonic interest.

"What's that supposed to mean?" the dark empath understood what Rose was insinuating, and wasn't very pleased with it. "We're friends, he gave me a place to live, I've been helping him through some problems lately, that's it."

"So, that's why you were just staring at him like a lioness eyeing an antelope?" Ravager's comment prompted Raven's eyebrows to furrow in frustration. "Don't feed me bullshit, Raven."

"You're way off base, Rose," the demi-demonness's voice was beginning to relay an irritated tone. "I mean, sure, he's not nearly as hard on the eyes as I've implied in the past, and I'm beginning to realize we have a lot more common ground than I previously thought, but Gar and I are just friends, nothing more!" After a moment, Raven continued in a subdued voice "besides, I'm not saying that I have feelings for him or anything like that, but I'm not his type. Think about it Rose, you've seen photos of Terra, and you've seen Jillian...he likes anorexic blondes."

"Yeah," Rose said in almost a laugh, "that he always seems to be concerned about _you_ in battle, he's always made it a mission to make _you_ smile, and he bends over backward to keep _you_ around him...none of these things show any interest at all." After a moment, she dropped the sarcasm. "And, you know Rave, when it comes to being thin, you don't exactly have much body mass to yourself either. I mean, _I'm_ just a hair above the limit between a normal BMI and an underweight one, and you're an inch taller than me and like five pounds lighter. And, I'm not trying to come onto you or anything, but, unlike those girls, you still manage to be that light without being a stick—you've got the right curves in the right places, plus you've got, like, a perfect pair of tits. When it comes down to physical attractiveness, you have all those girls beaten...imagine all of the fanboys who probably think of you when they wack off. And, you know, dark is sexy."

"A little inappropriate for a public conversation, Rose," Raven replied, blushing and wishing she wasn't in civilian clothes, so she could pull her hood up. "But, attractiveness is very subjective. I know I'm attractive to some boys, but that doesn't mean _he_ finds me attractive. And you still didn't address the blonde thing."

"What's there to address? Sure, Jillian was a natural blonde, but that doesn't matter too much with how often she dyes her hair. Pink, blue, red...and, now that I mention that, what do you get when you mix those colors?" Both girls dropped the conversation at pretty much that moment, as they saw Beast Boy emerging from the restroom. If he were most people, he'd still be out of earshot for whispering for another minute or two, but, with his advanced senses, it was extremely difficult to say anything without him hearing.

"Rose Wilson?" Beast Boy said as he noticed the guest sitting next to Raven. "When did you get here?"

"She snuck up on me about a second after you left the table," Raven replied for her.

"I always stop at this place when I'm passing through LA," Rose noted. "If you ask me, they've got some of the best cooks in the city, outside of expensive, high class joints."

"Well, what brings you to the City of Angels?"

"Passing through. I'm leaving the country tomorrow—picked up a nice-paying contract—and my flight'll be out of LAX."

Suddenly, Raven's communicator went off. "Vic? What's up?" the dark empath answered.

"It'd probably be a good idea if you got somewhere private," the voice on the other end replied. Raven quickly glanced at Rose, then to Garfield.

"When the food arrives, let them know I'll be back," she told the changeling before rising and heading outside, on a course bringing her in the direction of the car.

"So, what's going on between you two?" Rose wasted no time in seeking out Garfield's position on the situation, hoping that his answer would be more interesting than Raven's. "And don't give me any crap about not being interested in her. Everyone except for Raven knows that you've been crushing on her since day one."

"There's nothin' to it, really," Beast Boy replied, as a frown began to form on his face. "She'll never be interested in me as anything other than just a friend. So, we're just friends."

"Well," Rose paused for a moment trying to decide upon a suitable response, "why don't you think she would like?"

"Well, I don't know," he replied in a sarcastic tone. "Maybe because I annoy the crap out of her. Or maybe I'm too stupid for her. Or maybe I'm nothing like her. Take your pick. Either way, I'm not her type. She'd never be attracted to a stupid, obnoxious green freak like me!"

Now this was entertaining. Beneath Raven's denial of feelings for Beast Boy were doubts that he'd ever have romantic feelings for her. Meanwhile, Beast Boy's doubts that Raven would ever have feelings for him were the cause of his unwillingness to reveal his feelings to the dark empath. It took all the effort Rose could muster to refrain from laughing at this situation, but she felt an odd sense of pity for them both, but especially for Garfield.

"I'm sorry for bringing it up," she began, "maybe I could make it up to you?" Beast Boy did not know what to think of the mischievous grin on her face.

* * *

**Author's Notes  
**I'll take the time to make a note on Rose Wilson's eyes. Since this story bases itself on the one hand off from the continuity presented in the regular comics, and on the other hand from the continuity from Teen Titans and the Teen Titans Go! comics, it is thus possible for Rose to have either one or two eyes. In this particular continuity, I have decided that Rose never gouged her eye out, following from her appearance in the Teen Titans Go! comics; so she has both eyes.

I noted in this chapter that Bette Kane is Bruce Wayne's distant cousin. This is a complex matter, but it seems to be canon. Of course, Bette Kane is the daughter of an unnamed brother of Jacob Kane (Kate Kane's father), making her Jacob Kane's niece and Kate Kane's first cousin. It can be inferred based on the presence of a photo of Jacob and his daughters which appears in Philip Kane's loft (Philip Kane being Bruce Wayne's maternal uncle), that Martha Kane Wayne and Jacob Kane had a common ancestor, thus making Bruce Wayne a cousin to Kate Kane (and by extension Bette Kane). The exact consanguinity there is unknown, although it can probably be figured that they're not likely to be any closer than maybe third or fourth cousins, with possibly a generation or two removed.

Also, very early in the chapter, Duela Dent (who's also known by the names "Harlequin" and "Joker's Daughter" in the comics) is mentioned. For those who don't really know the character, she's basically a traveler from another universe who was apparently the daughter of the Jokester (her universe's analogue to the Joker, except the Jokester is actually a hero in that universe) and Evelyn Dent (a gender-flipped analogue to Harvey Dent). However, the only character mentioned in this story thusfar who would know the slightest thing about Duela's origin is Duela herself. Her origins were not revealed in the comics until after one of the Monitors charged with protecting the integrity of the multiverse hunted her down and killed her for being a multiversal anomaly.

Anyhow, I originally intended for the story content of this chapter and the following chapter to be one chapter, but I saw the opportunity for a cliffhanger and took it. Sorry about how long it took before I made this update, too—hopefully I'll post the next one sooner.

_**Isali Shade-**_Thanks. I'm glad you're digging the story so far. Hope this chapter is still to your taste. I'll be honest that, in stories that don't center on Cyborg, he can tend to be a bit of a third wheel, but I decided early on with this story that I wanted him to be certainly more prominent in the story than, say, Dick and Kory (although, those two will be making occasional re-appearances in the story, and will end up throwing Gar and Rae quite a curve ball at some point). To have a BBRae-centric story with Vic as just a minor background character doesn't really work so well IMO, considering his especially close big brother/best friend relationships with both of the leads; so, yeah, I think he should be a pretty prominent supporting character.

_**McDiggity-**_Thanks, I'm glad you're liking the story, and hope it continues to remain awesome for you.

_**Annatheavidreader-**_I'm currently thinking that either Chapter XIII or Chapter XIV will be set _during_ Bruce's wedding reception, so not too long now. I'm hoping that Chapter XI will be the last of the chapters occurring during its particular weekend in the story's timeline; this has been the ninth chapter to occur within the same two-day period in story...I think I'm getting kinda slow.

_**JOHNXgambit-**_I agree 1000%. I especially didn't like their treatment of Beast Boy and Raven. Beast Boy could have easily gone back to the Doom Patrol if he didn't have any other options, so there really wouldn't have been any situation that would have forced him to become a circus attraction. And Raven going insane just seems like a horrible attack against introverts; I mean, seriously, she's one of the sanest people in the entire series, and if loneliness after the Titans split up sent her to emotional destruction, she could have easily stayed with Cyborg to maintain a rump Titans team (and recreated the Titans with new additions), or she could have went to the Doom Patrol with Beast Boy, or she could have been Nightwing's sidekick—although I don't really think she should be _anyone's_ sidekick, and I'm not personally a fan of the RobRae angle.

_**JasonVUK-**_I was actually worrying if I might have gone a little overboard, but I figured since I could get there without a lot of conjecture separating that point from the canon, it's realistic enough lol

_**Hairul The Nightrage Beast-**_But, remember, Dick Grayson is on Tamaran with Starfire, incommunicado for the time being (well, at least until Bruce Wayne's wedding comes up).

* * *

**Audience**** Participation**  
I've decided to let the readers help me out with a few points (this'll be the first one) that I'm having difficulty deciding. Basically, I'm asking you for your opinions. This will not be a poll, however, as I'll mainly be looking for the rationales that make the most sense and seem the most interesting to me.

So, without further adieu, the first such point will be such: It's already been made somewhat clear in the preceding chapter that there's interest in Upper Lamumba in making Garfield their King. What should his reaction be? Should he take the throne? Should he refuse it? Should he momentarily take it and abdicate as soon as the crisis is over? Why?

Incidentally, this is a point where you, the readers, will be able to influence a major part of where the sequels will be going.


	12. Chapter XI: Falling Into Place

**Disclaimer:** I do not own the Teen Titans.

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**Ascension of the Beast**

**Chapter XI**

**Falling Into Place**

_'How could I be so stupid?'_ Garfield thought, as he watched the street lights pass by. The ride back to the Logan house seemed much longer than the ride to the restaurant had been, but that could be chalked up to the tension in the car. While Raven had been outside talking to Cyborg, the changeling made the mistake of agreeing to two proposals offered by Rose Wilson. The first was not particularly controversial—Raven and Rose had enough mutual respect that Rose spending a night under the same roof as the empath would not be a problem. But in agreeing to the second, Gar had momentarily forgotten a very important aspect of what made Raven who she was, and she was definitely not happy with him at the moment.

_'How could I agree to host a party without asking her about it?"_ he silently asked himself. _'It's _my_ house legally, but I'd like to think it's her home too. I should have shown her more courtesy than to just agree to it without asking her, as if she's a guest with no say.'_ A frown materialized on his face as he realized, _'shit! I've given our actual guest more of a say.'_ He cupped his face in his hands as the monologue in his head turned into a simple string of multiple repetitions of the word "stupid."

Raven could definitely feel his emotions—guilt, self-loathing, regret. Sure, the fact that he hadn't consulted her before agreeing to fill the house with people and loud noises had angered her a little, but she was beginning to suspect he might be reading too much into the quiet tension of the ride; she wasn't really _that_ angry at him. She wished she could read his thoughts—well, technically she _could_, seeing as her astral self's little journey into his mind the previous night had, as an unavoidable side-effect, created a psychic link between them, but she maintained an important practical and ethical rule that such links were to be closed at all times, except in case of emergency, and this was certainly no emergency.

Meanwhile, from the backseat, Rose observed the interaction—or lack thereof—between the two. She was beginning to think she may have made an error by asking only Beast Boy—Raven lived there too, and she was never one to be happy about being flooded with a lot of noise and people. Then again, that in itself would have posed a problem, seeing as Raven would have likely said no, and Rose's plan was entirely centered on this party. But it would ruin her plan if Raven ended up hating the changeling as a result of this lapse of judgment.

Rose also wondered if it might be excessively cruel that she didn't fill him in on the details about just who she was going to invite. She had merely told him that she was going to invite some friends to throw a party, and that they'd hopefully ensure it'd be a good time. That was an outright lie, in fact, as even when she made the phone call, she did not know a single person among the group she invited. But she did know that this particular group would probably create an uncomfortable situation for both of her hosts. The shock to Raven would be intentional—it was really the entire reason Rose was doing this to begin with. But poor Beast Boy; his discomfort would be entirely incidental.

Turning the wheel as she eased the vehicle into the carport, Raven decided to break the silence. "Gar," she said in a voice she hoped would communicate that she wasn't angry, "can I talk to you in private for a minute when we get back inside? Vic had some things to say that I think you should probably know about."

Beast Boy didn't know entirely what to think, but he could at least feel relief. _'Good, she doesn't hate me,'_ he thought as the car came to a stop. He was, however, rather confused as they entered the house and began to traverse the hallway to Raven's room. What had Cy told her that was so important that she needed to immediately relay it to him? Also, why was she leading him to her bedroom when the study could probably work just as well? As he thought about it, he figured the only real advantage Raven's room would have would be privacy—no one who knew _anything_ about Raven was stupid enough to invade her bedroom. _'But what's the big secret?'_ he thought to himself, as the pair entered the empath's private refuge.

As Raven locked the door, she made sure to activate a spell she'd set up to make the room soundproof. "Vic told me some things about the meeting he had, and it actually has a lot to do with what we've been talking about today," she said in a quiet, but easily understood tone. "But, before I can tell you anything, you have to know that a lot of this is information that the government is classifying as Top Secret, and Vic was only allowed to tell us because of our security clearances and because of how central you are to everything. So, we can't say a word to anyone else about about most of this without the CIA's permission."

Garfield was certainly taken aback by this. He hadn't expected that the United States federal government would be very interested in what was going on; indeed, the question of whether Africa or Antarctica attracted more of Washington's attention was subject to serious debate. "Okay," he answered, "I won't tell anyone."

"Well, this first part isn't really a secret, but you might want to sit down, because I'm pretty sure it's going to be pretty personal for you," Raven began, while gesturing for him to take a seat beside her on the side of her bed. As he complied, she continued: "The project that Vic has been assigned...they've asked him to develop a Sakutia vaccine."

Now Gar was very confused, which for once was because he knew more than one might expect him to about the subject. "How is that even possible? I mean, people don't live long enough to even begin to develop antibodies, and there is no weak strain of the virus which won't kill the person within three days..."

"They think you're the key," she interrupted him. The words left him visibly dumbstruck. "S.T.A.R. Labs, the CDC, the WHO...they think that since the serum your dad gave you didn't kill the virus, but rather altered your DNA to protect you from its effects, you might have the antibodies they need coursing through your blood as we speak."

"Wow," was his simple reply. He was having trouble wrapping his head around this, and it was apparent in both the tone of his voice and the look on his face, but Raven had no time to stop the conversation.

"The part where it starts to become a state secret is the reason _why_ they need the vaccine," she said. "Apparently, the CIA has uncovered information implying that some unknown financiers from Metropolis and Gotham are pouring money into Lamumba in exchange for Kibwana partnering with them to weaponize the virus."

"**_Fuck!_**" he exclaimed as his eyes widened in horror and the color drained from his skin, transforming his hue into that of an avocado. It was an uncharacteristic use of profanity, but certainly justified. "That...that would be a Doomsday weapon. If they can weaponize Sakutia, and use it, _every_ person infected...would die!"

"There's more," Raven added. "The CIA said the Lamumban government-in-exile wants to get into contact with you. Apparently, they figure that since you had a connection to their country and you're a well-known superhero, you'd want to help." What Cyborg never told Raven, and hence Raven never had the opportunity to tell Beast Boy, was the fact that such a large segment of the Lamumban population regarded Gar as a messianic figure and there was interest in enthroning him if he did intervene. Cyborg didn't relay this information mostly because he figured Raven would be incredulous to it, and it would perhaps be best if Gar heard it directly from the Lamumbans themselves—but there was also a concern that it might go to his head, as well.

Beast Boy gave a short chuckled. "Am I that predictable?"

"It's not you," Raven answered. "It's the situation. Anyone, in your position, with your powers, and with your past, would probably be thinking the same things you've been thinking. But, there is a lot of opportunity here."

The changeling looked at her with a quizzical look, as if to ask for an elaboration.

"Judging by the CIA's interest, we can probably expect covert support from Washington," Raven noted. "Also, the Lamumban government-in-exile could put us in contact with rebel groups within the country. So, it seems, everything's actually falling into place in a good way. We just need to put our team together."

"And figure out how to get them all into Lamumba," Gar added, as he stood, still facing her. "But, you're right. Everything does seem to be falling into place, like it was destiny, or something." He scratched the back of his head as he pondered the meaning to it all. Then he thought of something else. "So, how much does Cy know about my past now?"

"Just the most basic facts about what your connection to Lamumba is and how you ended up with your powers," she answered. "At first, he seemed a little offended that you never told him anything, but I told him that you'd been through a lot of traumatic experiences and you didn't really want to relive them. I didn't tell him anything else about it, though. If you want me to tell him what I saw, I can. But I won't unless you want me to."

"You might as well," he replied. "I wish I could tell him, but, well...you know." His head began to hang lower as a frown grew over his face.

Raven placed her hand on his shoulder in a supportive gesture. "It's okay," she told him, "no one would want to relive what you've been through. After I assured him that your past was probably the most traumatic of all of ours, I'm sure he understands." She slid her hand down and over to the spot between his shoulder blades and began rubbing him in an effort to comfort him. "Don't beat yourself up about it," she added as she gave him a pat on the back and removed her hand.

Garfield lifted his head and shot her a weak smile in response. "You know," he said, "for someone who forces herself to suppress and deny her own emotions, you're really good at stuff like this." A twinkle briefly appeared in his eye before he continued. "You're a good friend, Rave. I appreciate everything you've done and you've been doing for me."

"You're my friend," Raven responded. "I suppose I have to be nice sometime," she gave one of her trademark barely-noticeable smiles before her face turned to a firm representation of stoicism. "I wouldn't be a very good friend if I didn't try to help you through this," she said in spoken words, although her mind quietly added _'especially with all the times you've been there for me.'_

"I wouldn't think any less of you if you didn't," the changeling spoke as he began to stand. "You're my friend and just having you think of me as a friend is enough for me to always appreciate you. I almost feel like you've been spoiling me this weekend." He paused for a moment. "I guess I should probably get out there and see if the guests Rose invited have arrived," Garfield noted, before adding "are you gonna come out and have fun with us, or are you gonna stay in here and enjoy your reading?"

"You know parties aren't my thing," she replied honestly. "I might make an appearance, but don't count on it."

"I'll try to keep the music down so it doesn't disturb you," he said as he opened the door. It was an unusual show of understanding on his part, but he knew by now that if she wanted time alone with her books, it was best to leave her be—even with how stubborn he can be, it's hard to avoid accepting something so simple after it's been beaten into you for four years. Still, as he traversed the hallway toward the great room, he wished she'd be there. _'I don't really know if I should trust Rose with that evil smirk she was flashing earlier.'_

As he entered the room, he found that he was every bit correct to worry. Before him was a occupied by a number of women who appeared to range in age from about 18 to around 25, every one of giving him the same look of longing one might suggest a pride of lions who hadn't eaten for a week might give to a t-bone. A couple of them were even licking their chops, and he could certainly feel that uncomfortable sensation of having someone undress him with their eyes.

* * *

**Author's Notes  
**This is another case where I was going to write one chapter but ended up dividing it into two. The next chapter is going to be rather long regardless, as I figured the most natural point to split them was right where this one ends. Anyhow, this should be a nice short bit of conversation to hold you over until I post the next chapter (which should not be long, as I didn't make the choice to split the chapters until after I was already done with like 2/3 of the content of what will be the next chapter), although I must warn that the content I have written thus far for the next chapter has convinced me to upgrade the fic's rating to M. Chapter XII is most certainly not going to be family-friendly, and it'll have some controversial plot elements.

_**BrandonK679-**_I hear that. I guess my main question with regard to how Garfield reacts, though, is how I want to play with it in regard to his personality development. If, on the one hand, his reluctance to lead is played as a residual effect of his obvious self-esteem issues (I mean, come on, the guy blames himself for his parents' death), then it might be a useful plot element to show him becoming more willing to lead as his character develops through the story. On the other hand, Gar's reluctance to lead could also be played as a matter of honor, invoking the Cincinnatus character trope, which would actually make him even more heroic, IMO.

_**shugokage, daniiibabiii-**_Glad you like it. Hope it continues to be as good.

_**LiumD-**_Like I was saying in my response to BrandonK679, I'm mostly divided on the issue of how I want to play it in relation to Gar's personality. In that respect, I'm still pretty much undecided, though.

_**Annatheavidreader-**_I always figured that Duela tended to act up mostly when the Titans weren't including her, and on the flip side of that, you have the fact that Raven was able to get Duela to do a Heel-Face Turn and start kicking Enigma's ass very easily by just inviting Duela to join the Teen Titans. She's only as reasonable as a lunatic can be, but the one constant throughout her interaction with the Titans is that she seems to have an obsession with being one, and then she acts up when she's not one.

As far as Bette goes, don't worry. I will not be teasing any sort of romantic connection between Gar and Bette in this fic. Although I'm going to keep her single for a while, I do have a pairing in mind for her which neither involves Gar nor Dick, so she'll be neutralized to some degree romantically. As far as her canon relationship with Gar goes, I'm not sure how far it actually went, but I do know that there was at the very least a significant amount of ship teasing; I think the writers were planning on pairing them if the Titans LA story got its own permanent series, but that never happened. At any rate, Bette's obsession with Dick certainly would have been an obstacle to a relationship with Gar. I kinda feel sorry for her, though...she never gets to boy. Certainly never helped that she was so obsessive over Dick though; his love life is too much like Bruce's: been loved by many women, but really only loved two in return.

As for the nature of the relationship between Beast Boy and Raven, even if they're not romantically paired, they'd still be subject to the Platonic Life Partners, Vitriolic Best Buds and Like an Old Married Couple tropes carrying over from the cartoons, so, yeah, I do not see any future where their special relationship does not carry on ad infinitum. Then again, I'm also of the opinion that the cartoon built up WAAAAAAY too much Belligerent Sexual Tension between them for them to remain perpetually platonic...at some point they'd eventually have a heated argument, there'd be a few slaps, and the next thing you know their tongues would be buried in each other's throats and they'd be trying to rip each other's clothes off (well, if it weren't a family-friendly cartoon, at least lol). Of course, I've already defused most of the BST for this story, so I'm not going in the Slap-Slap-Kiss direction.

Oh, and I'll throw you a bone and give you this spoiler, since you mentioned her: Cassie Sandsmark is indeed on the list of Titans I want to include in this story.

_**CheeseJellyBean-**_Glad you like it, hope it continues to be an enjoyable read. I intentionally wanted the conversation that Cyborg and Raven were having at the beginning of Chapter II to be an ambiguous teaser. I can't dispel any of the ambiguity without spoiling something, but it'll make sense sooner or later. I had originally been intending to write a lot more than I actually have from Beast Boy's POV, but for some reason, the Raven POV chapters just kept coming and coming. Most of Chapter XII will be in BB's POV, though.

_**JasonVUK-**_Well, I've got some nagging doubts about this chapter and the next one, but I'm glad you've liked it so far.

_**Hairul The Nightrage Beast-**_Yeah, I did kinda neglect to mention her swordsmanship skills, but they'll be invoked from time to time in the story. As far as her matchmaking goes, well...we'll see in the next chapter how much win it is.

**Audience Participation (II):  
**Are there any artists out there who would like to create a cover image for this fic? Send me a PM if interested.


	13. Chapter XII: If You Were to Ignore Me

**Disclaimer:** I neither own the Teen Titans, nor any particular song which might be mentioned or portrayed in this fic.

* * *

**Ascension of the Beast**

**Chapter XII**

**If You Were to Ignore Me**

As the herd of stampeding fangirls rushed forward, Beast Boy could see his life flashing before his eyes. Okay, maybe that was a bit of an overreaction, but certainly it became difficult for him to breathe as the overexcited girls dogpiled him. Gar's thoughts were running a mile a minute. _'Can't morph into anything big, 'cause that might hurt them,'_ he thought. _'If I go small, they might hurt me. Hmm...what if I go _really_ small?' _After barely half a second of thought, the animorph disappeared seemingly into thin air, confusing all of the girls.

"I didn't know he could teleport!" one of the girls said, as the dogpile dissolved itself.

Another girl turned to Rose and asked, "can he transform into any single-cell organisms?" Before Rose could answer, Beast Boy transformed into a mouse and ran across the room, between Rose's feet, and transformed back into a human while cowering behind his white-haired friend.

"Yes," he answered the question himself, "I can shift into microbes too, which I learned this one time I turned myself into an amoeba." Most of the girls were quite entertained by the performance, which gave the changeling mixed feelings. On the one hand, he loved making people happy, but it also reminded him of the possible future Starfire had seen. He really did not want to end up becoming a circus attraction.

Most of the girls were so appeased by the performance that they were now more willing to give the object of their attention some breathing room. For the next couple hours, Beast Boy was made quite busy signing autographs for just about every girl who came up to him with a piece of paper, or a doll, or a t-shirt—as his wrist began to cramp, he was getting ready to curse Robin for talking the team into making merchandising deals to raise extra money. After signing what felt like everything in the room—all of which being done while standing—the changeling finally took the opportunity to rest his feet, settling himself down on the sofa.

Around the room, things had actually settled down quite a bit. Several of the girls were making conversation with each other in one group, and another few were talking to Rose—apparently, although she was by no means idolized by hordes of female fans, there was some large degree of respect for her. Thinking about it, Garfield realized why that made sense: Rose's most significant strengths were skills that anyone could master with proper training. Sure, she had some significant metahuman abilities, like her enhanced mental and physical abilities and her limited precognition, but none of them were accidental. Only a demi-demon could be like Raven, and only a single kid with the bad and good luck of being infected with a disease which literally killed everyone else it ever infected while having ingenious parents who would do anything to save him could be like Beast Boy, but anybody could be like Ravager, which made her a reasonable focus for the imaginations of these normals.

Of course, Rose was quick to point out that it wasn't really a blessing. "Being a superheroine isn't fun," she told her attentive audience, "unless you like watching people you care about die, or be seduced by evil. My uncle kidnapped me and my mother ended up dying in the process of rescuing me. My father was as evil as they come, and so was my oldest brother. Now, all that's left of my blood family are my other older brother and I, and he can't talk because when he was a child someone who was trying to get information out of my father slit his throat and destroyed his vocal chords." She sighed before concluding, "the only advice I can give you is just keep your normal lives. There's too much pain in being a superhero. All of us in the superhero racket—everyone from Superman and Batman, down—have scars. Scars which run so deep, they actually define who we are."

"Even Beast Boy?" one of the girls asked, innocently. Obviously the public had a huge lack of information about his history.

"I don't know his past too well," Ravager noted, honestly. "Of all of the Titans, the only one I know who is anywhere near as secretive about his past as he is would be the first Robin..." The conversation was occurring within earshot of the changeling, and Rose's words caused him to drift into an silent daymare, reliving his past traumas. He never did hear the rest of what his white-haired friend was telling the fangirls.

Moments later, Raven entered the room. She was initially drawn to the room by the emotions her empathic senses were picking up on, but as she entered the room, she was quickly distracted by questions regarding a rather conspicuous fact she noticed: _'why are all of the guests female?'_ Finding the taco fest to be rather unusual, she desired immediate answers. "Ravager," she used Rose's codename in front of the civilians, "who are all of these girls?"

"Los Angeles Chapter of the Garfield Logan Fan Club," the white-haired Titan answered bluntly, "or, actually, the members who could make it on such short notice." Raven gave an immensely quizzical look in response, not knowing what Rose's angle was. Slade's daughter Rose was indeed. "Well, since you're so insistent about not liking him, I figured we might as well get some girls in here who do."

The impact of the words was inexplicably hard on Raven, but she opted to maintain her stoic demeanor as best she could. Nevertheless, the unidentified feelings she had been experiencing earlier upon Gar's mention of Bette Kane's name began to resurface and she found herself unable to leave the room, as much as she told herself that she had no reason to stay. Her body, emotions and unconscious mind were willing her to stay and observe the interactions between her Beast Boy and these fangirls. For some reason Tokyo kept coming to her mind.

Meanwhile, Garfield was pulled back into reality as he felt the couch cushion to his right sink. Suddenly he found that he was no-longer alone at the sofa, as he had been joined by not one, but two women. One of them sat on the couch beside him, while the other stood before the seat to his left. "Uh...hi," he was somewhat confused, but tried to be friendly nonetheless, "what can I do for you ladies?"

"Just being in your presence is unbelievably awesome," the woman to his right answered, "but we were wondering if maybe you were still up for giving autographs?"

"Sure, I guess. What are your names?" he replied.

"I'm Candi," replied the one who was sitting to his right. He could swear he'd seen Candi somewhere before, but he really couldn't place it. She was quite an attractive woman physically. She had flaxen hair and green eyes, and her skin had a light but alluringly natural tanned tone. He surmised that she probably stood at around 5'6", and although she had a slim waist, her hips were absolutely perfect; he had to guess that she probably had one of those asses that looks like an upside down heart. Her bust was actually too much, though, as each of her breasts was roughly the size of his head. The curious thing was, however, that, although he could tell from the way her nipples tented the fabric of her blouse that she was not wearing a bra, her breasts looked unusually firm and perky for their size, considering they did not presently have any real support. He had to wonder how much was actual mammary and how much was silicone.

"And I'm Candi's cousin Mandy," added the one who was standing. From one good look, he surmised that Mandy was almost certainly an athlete of some form, as the term "athletic" described her body shape to the fullest. Her hair, in contrast to her cousin, was more of a strawberry blonde, and her eyes were blue, while her skin had the exact same tone to it as her cousin's. She appeared to be about 5'5", and although she obviously had a lot more muscle than fat, she by no means looked anything like a female bodybuilder. Her bust was much smaller than that of her cousin—he was guessing she wore a B-cup—but that's not what really got his attention about her. Her skirt was short—short enough that he could see the bottoms of her buttocks _while she was standing straight_.

His instincts were on fire telling him to steer clear of these girls, but what was he to do? They were fans, and his sense of honor dictated that he had to be grateful to his fans; besides, other than some less than modest apparel choices, he had not really seen anything yet which would justify his gut feeling. But as he looked for the items they wanted him to sign, he realized the curious fact that neither of them was bearing any merchandise or other signable items. "What do you want me to sign?"

"Not so much a what," answered Mandy with a flirty tone to her voice, "more of a where." Smiling, she moved her hand to the back of her skirt and lifted it, revealing her right buttock. She was wearing a thong, and it seemed she seriously wanted him to sign her ass.

"I don't think this is a good idea..."

"Aw, come on Gar," Rose's voice interrupted him from behind. her mischievous smirk was now threatening to become a grin as she and Raven moved into a position immediately behind the changeling's spot on the couch. "Are you really going to turn down a loyal fan?"

He didn't know what Rose's angle was, but he feared at this point it wasn't going to be for his own good. He looked to Raven with a look on his face which essentially begged her to get him out of this, but she was too busy trying to resist the white-haired Titan's attempts to get her to do whatever it was she wanted her to do, to do anything for him. With that, his face took on a somewhat defeated look, as he took the sharpie from Candi's hand and proceeded to sign her cousin's buttock.

"See," Rose commented, "that wasn't so bad, was it?" Raven was actually quicker to shoot the anti-heroine a glare than was Beast Boy, but he wasn't very far behind, shooting the white-haired girl a glare of his own as Mandy sat down beside him.

"And wh..." Gar said while turning to face Candi, but his question was answered before he could even finish the second word of it. While he had been distracted with first signing Mandy's butt, then glaring at Rose, Candi had unbuttoned her blouse to the point where her breasts were completely revealed above her nipples—even the tops of her areolae were visible. Nevertheless, he could only figure that signing breasts was a step _more_ reasonable than signing someone's ass, so he simply shrugged and complied. Raven's unidentified feeling was beginning to strengthen Rage's resolve, but she still held any manifestation of it back.

Rose took Raven aside. "You're not _jealous_, are you?" the white-haired teen whispered to the grey-skinned empath. Rose knew she was laying it on kind of strong, but she was intent on making Raven face the truth before the end of the night.

To say that Beast Boy felt awkward for the first ten minutes or so after giving Candi and Mandy his autograph would be a gross understatement, but the two girls were intent on continuing their interaction with the object of their admiration. Eventually the uncomfortable feeling wore off as the two engaged him in a more innocent conversation. He learned that Mandy was a 19-year old college freshman who, in confirmation of his initial suspicions, was on an athletic scholarship. Candi was 25, but was suspiciously coy about her occupation, stating only that she was a "performer;" he still, however, could not shake the feeling that he had seen her somewhere before. Apparently the two girls had taken an especially strong liking for the changeling after an incident several years earlier during which he saved the lives of Mandy's parents.

It was also becoming quite obvious that Beast Boy's attentions were divided. After his initial difficulty disappeared, the two girls actually were fairly compelling conversationalists, but the changeling was drifting out of the conversation every five minutes or so as his gaze around the room found Raven. For her part, Raven was actually staring at Beast Boy and the two fangirls as Rose went through the motions of rubbing elbows with the other girls, though Raven's strong feelings at the time blinded her to the fact that he was also occasionally gazing at her. Candi and Mandy were meanwhile becoming frustrated with having to share the changeling's attention with the empath.

"You know," Candi spoke in a seductive tone as she leaned into Beast Boy, running her hand on his inner thigh and deliberately pressing her chest against the side of his arm. "We could take care of any needs you might have," she whispered in his ear, before landing a gentle—but alluring—kiss just below his jawline. He could not suppress his arousal, but the larger of his heads was still ultimately in command.

"Uh," he said in a nervous tone, "I seriously don't think this is a good idea..." Apparently he wasn't the only one having a problem with this interaction, as Raven, for reasons beyond her own comprehension, was beginning to seethe at the sight of the present interactions between the two blondes and her green housemate. The empath was still, however, able to stow her emotions.

"Well," Candi took his left hand and planted it firmly on her own right breast as she responded, "if these don't convince you, we _could_ give you a show." She kissed him just below his pointy ear before giving a look to her cousin—both of them knew what they were going to do.

"I don't..."

"Oh, come on BB," Mandy entered the conversation, but immediately interrupted her own words to run the tip of her tongue along the edge of his left ear. "We only want you to have some fun with us," she said as her hand found and groped his crotch. The smile that took over her face as she did so, without context, would have made someone think she'd won the lottery. She leaned in and began to whisper something into her cousin's ear, but the conversation that resulted was inaudible. Either way, regardless of what they were talking about, the two women gave him a look which could only be described as "hungry," as they came out of their little sidebar.

"Just watch," Candi said, while briefly brushing her own hand between his legs. At that moment the elder of the two women reached over to her cousin and the two began to make out while leaning over him. This situation very quickly created a huge internal conflict for Beast Boy.

_"Dude!"_ said Tamaa, the manifestation of Beast Boy's lust and more sexual desires, _"this is so fucking hot!"_

_"Shut the hell up, Tamaa!"_ said Mafutu, the manifestation of Beast Boy's senses of anger (albeit, less passionate than the primal rage the Beast is known for), irritability, exacerbation, torment, and, particularly applicable to this situation, disgust, _"I think I have to hurl. They're cousins, we're watching incest!"_

_"I agree with Mafutu,"_ noted Busara, _"this spectacle is absolutely abhorrent. Besides, Raven is watching us. Do you really want her to see us getting off to this?"_

_'Uh...who are you and why are you in my head?!'_ thought Beast Boy, very confused and quite unaware that he had emoticlones.

_"We're your emotions, numbnuts!"_ replied Mafutu. _"You should listen carefully, 'cause this shit's gonna be important."_

_'Uh, okay.'_

_"I think master should reject these females,"_ the Beast added, _"they are not the mate, and it will anger the mate if master mates with them."_ Surprisingly, in spite of his primal nature, the Beast appeared to be a fan of monogamy. Or maybe just a fan of not angering Raven's Rage.

_"What's it matter?"_ said Ghamu, the manifestation of the changeling's sadness, anguish, shame, guilt and various other 'low' emotions, _"she'll never love us like we love her..."_ Ghamu's words were interrupted by his own sobbing.

_"Exactly,"_ said Tamaa, _"she'll never love us, so we might as well get in on some strange!"_

_"I disagree,"_ said Mpenzi, the manifestation of Gar's more romantic love, affection and longings, _"there is always hope that she may return our affections, someday."_

_"The mate _does_ love us,"_ the Beast interjected. _"Trust my instincts!"_

_"Besides,"_ added Nyonda, the representation of Beast Boy's more platonic love and affection, _"even if she doesn't love us romantically, she has affection for us platonically, and we owe it to her not to subject her to undue stress. We know she isn't going to like watching this!"_

_"Also,"_ added Busara, _"have you noticed how much she's been staring at us tonight? But, on an unrelated note, Candi's tramp stamp looks_ very_ familiar."_

Beast Boy took a more conscious look at Candi's lower back. Leaning in had led the back of her shirt to rise and her jeans to lower, giving him an unobstructed view of the entire region from her butt cleavage to the small of her back. _'Oh my God!'_ he instantly, upon setting eyes upon the tattoo, realized where he had seen this woman before. On his most recent birthday, Aqualad, Cyborg and a few others among the Titan males decided to throw him a more mature side party to his birthday party, in honor of him becoming an adult. At this side party, they watched a hardcore pornographic film, starring a blonde who had a now very familiar tattoo on her lower back. _'No! It couldn't be!'_

_"Are you so sure about that?"_ Busara responded. _"This _is_ Los Angeles, you know. And both the woman and her tattoo are perfect matches to the star of that film, and she did say that she's a 'performer'."_

This revelation only exacerbated his internal conflict. Tamaa, the gigantic pervert that he naturally was, found it to be insanely attractive. The things that Beast Boy had seen this woman do on film were crazy, and he couldn't help but be curious about a lot of them. Still, he had to hold firm—even if Raven didn't have romantic feelings for him, he did for her, and in recent times he had recognized that it would be disloyal for him to pursue a relationship—or casual sex, for that matter—with another woman while he had feelings for her. And the idea of casual sex really wasn't his thing anyway; he was too loving to base an encounter entirely upon the fulfillment of lust (though he did normally enjoy the morale boost that being the object of women's affection gave him). Additionally, that he had seen Candi perform bareback scenes made him apprehensive at the very least about the safety of doing anything with her.

His mind was made up—he had to find a way to reject the women's advances. But on the same coin, there were some unique problems owing to his situation. For one thing, he had to be courteous in rejecting these women because, regardless of him not wanting to sleep with them, they were fans and he appreciated all of his fans.

"Ladies, please," Beast Boy finally interrupted their over-the-top attempt at turning him on, "I'm sorry, you're both very sexy, but I'm not interested."

"Aw, come on BB," Candi replied, not wanting to let the issue rest, "we're really big fans, and my cousin is a virgin. She's been saving herself for someone special, and she thinks you're special enough."

"We promise, it'll just be this once," Mandy added, "you'll never have to see or hear from us again."

"I'm a virgin too," he admitted, "but I don't want to lose my virginity in a casual encounter."

"How the hell are you still a virgin?" asked a somewhat confused Candi. "As hot as you are, I would have thought some lucky girl would have had you years ago."

"Three could have," he admitted, "but one betrayed me and my friends, another was never ready, and the third one will probably never see me as anything more than just a friend. I've dated other women, but I will only sleep with someone I know I love, and I've only ever been sure with those three." Raven, eavesdropping on the conversation, was obviously able to identify the first girl he listed as having been Terra and the second as Jillian Jackson, but she was curious and stumped about the other. And she was also feeling an inexplicable urge to send that other woman to another dimension.

Candi laughed. "You're seriously telling me you'd only fuck someone you loved? I'm sorry Beast Boy, but I wasn't born yesterday. I know that deep down inside," she groped his crotch, "men are in general perverted and always eager to fuck."

Beast Boy stirred in an attempt to get up, but Candi quickly crossed her leg over his and pinned his shoulder against the backrest of the couch with her forearm. "Please," he said, "just leave me alone."

"You can quit playing hard to get," she told him, "I know you want it. I felt your hard cock. And I'm beginning to find this whole pursuit very aggravating. Just give us what we want already."

"Uh, Ravager," Raven turned to the white-haired Titan, "I think Gar might need help." If Rose had looked at Raven's face at that moment, she would have seen the genuine look of concern in her eyes. Unfortunately, she just figured Raven was trying to come up with an excuse.

"Just admit you're jealous."

"I'm _not!_ I just think he might really be in trouble!"

"Come on Rae, you know that he can handle himself."

But the problem was that he couldn't. Candi's forearm was the least of the binds tying Beast Boy in that moment; there were really two more severe, yet intangible chains holding him in place. As a superhero, Gar could not harm a civilian. As a man of honor, he additionally could not do anything to harm a woman (supervillains excepted, but these girls were hardly supervillains). These rules meant he had to limit the proportion of his attempts to free himself to a point where he could not actually free himself. The fact that he wasn't trying to free himself with his full might was not lost on his de facto captors, either.

"Seriously," Candi said, "you want me to believe that you don't want it, while you're doing nothing to free yourself. I'm not that naive; you could throw me across the room if you wanted to, but you're not. That means you don't really want this to stop. You really do want us."

"No," he replied, "I seriously don't want to have sex with either of you."

Candi sighed. "Well, if you're not done with your little game, we'll just have to keep playing with you, I guess." She leaned in and whispered something to her cousin, who proceeded to rise. Removing an iPod from her purse, she proceeded to plug the device into the stereo as Candi continued to hold Beast Boy down. She cycled through the available playlist and after a moment a song that certainly seemed somewhat anachronistic for a person her age (though not entirely unreasonable) began to play.

As the music began to play, Mandy strutted toward the couch, hips swinging up and down, left and right, in a seductive form. Her eyes conveyed the message of a burning lust on the verge of exploding outright. The young woman climbed upon the couch, her knees landing on either side of the only male in the house. Now Beast Boy was pinned down by Mandy's entire body, so it became unnecessary for her cousin to hold him down. As the lyrics began to play, the 19-year old planted each of her hands to one of his shoulders, holding him in place.

Watching this spectacle, Raven's powers began to manifest a black aura around the light bulb of a nearby floor lamp. The as-of-yet unidentified feeling was growing stronger, and Raven was not sure how long she would be able to hold it back.

_I love myself, I want you to love me_  
_When I'm feeling down, I want you above me_  
_I search myself, I want you to find me_  
_I forget myself, I want you to remind me_

Mandy planted a kiss on the changeling's lips, but he stubbornly refused to part them as she ran her tongue along them—indeed, he refused even to return the kiss. He only opened his mouth to voice his protest, "please stop," as she moved her mouth to the vicinity of his ear.

"If you're a good boy and do as you're supposed to," she whispered, "I'll give you a _very_ happy ending." She looked in his eyes and, while licking her lips, moved her right hand down to grope his genital region. "But if you're a bad boy and don't do what I want, you _will_ be punished," she whispered before squeezing down to pinch his testicles.

Meanwhile, inside Raven's mindscape, Rage had seen more than enough. _"How dare she,"_ the embodiment of all of Raven's anger, hatred and the emotions subordinate thereto spoke. _"**Get your hands off my Beast!** Raven, give me control! **Now!**"_**  
**

_I don't want anybody else_  
_When I think about you, I touch myself_  
_Oh, I don't want anybody else, oh, no_  
_Oh, no, oh, no_

"Help," Beast Boy cried in an agonized squeak. Mandy took control of one of his hands and forced it between her legs. When Beast Boy pulled the hand away almost instantaneously, the girl gave him another painful squeeze to the testes. "Please stop."

"Quit fighting!" she said. "I want you. Quit teasing me with your hard to get routine!" Apparently Mandy's line of thought on the matter was identical to Candi's.

Raven wanted to end the invasion of his dignity, but her denial of having feelings for him and Rose's teasing stopped her from acting. Her emotions were no where near being in conflict, though. _"He doesn't want you, bitch! Leave our Beast Boy alone!"_ said Brave, nearly as angry as Rage herself. Timid and Affection were both sobbing, both out of empathy for Garfield and out of their recognition of a fact that Raven herself had not yet consciously accepted: she wanted him for herself.

Rose, meanwhile, was beginning to wonder if this had gone too far. She thought the changeling could handle himself, but he didn't seem to be enjoying any of this, and his multiple protests were being completely ignored by the girls.

_You're the one who makes me coming running_  
_You're the sun who makes me shine_  
_When you're around I'm always laughin',_  
_I want to make you mine_

_"Nu-uh, bitch, that's **my** Boo Bear!"_ Happy joined the fray with an anger that was very unlike her. Then again, this really should not have been a surprise, as it was by now well-documented that Happy was among those emoticlones of Raven's who had most liked Beast Boy. The normally-cheerful emotion was not putting up with this. _"Get your own!"_

_I close my eyes and see you before me_  
_Think I would die if you were to ignore me_  
_A fool could see just how much I adore you_  
_I'd get down on my knees, I'd do anything for you_

The lyrics left Raven with a thought she could not reconcile with her denial. As much as she'd tried over the years to maintain that she wanted him to leave her alone, she had always been much more dependent on him emotionally than she'd let on. It was absolute torture on her when Terra and Jillian had distracted his attention from her.

Meanwhile, in a move that constituted a supreme assault against the changeling's dignity, Mandy removed a martingale collar from her purse and placed it around his neck. This was not going well.

_I don't want anybody else_  
_When I think about you, I touch myself_  
_Oh, I don't want anybody else, oh, no_  
_Oh, no, oh, no_

"Be a good boy," the blonde told Beast Boy as she pulled on the collar's ring. Her voice sounded as if she was talking to a pet dog she was trying to train, or something like that. "When I kiss you, you kiss back. Got it?"

Raven was meanwhile beginning to see the light—figuratively, of course, as her powers made the light bulb her aura had encased explode at that moment. The explosion was not enough to divert everyone's shocked attention from what was happening on the couch, however. She was beginning to realize that she was indeed jealous. And along with her jealous, she realized...

_I love myself, I want you to love me_  
_When I feel down, I want you above me_  
_I search myself, I want you to find me_  
_I forget myself, I want you to remind me_

...she loved him. Not the momentary crush her 15-year old self had once felt for Aqualad. Not the puppy-love-like feelings that she'd felt for Goth Boy and Jericho in her adolescent years. This was far more powerful a feeling than she had ever had for even Malchior. She loved Beast Boy, she was in love with Beast Boy; not just a simple infatuation, but limerence surfaced as well. As much as it pained her, she also had to recognize this feeling was not transient either; she had been feeling it for years, but until this moment, she never allowed it to penetrate the defenses of her denial. Now her the rampart of her denial had collapsed as though it were a castle made of sand, stricken by the tide. Now she had to face the truth. It would have been overwhelming if she didn't have a more immediate—albeit related—concern to distract her for the moment.

"Please," Beast Boy pleaded with the girl, "I don't want to do any of this. How many times do I..." He was unable to finish his words, as the girl pulled on the collar's ring again to choke him slightly.

"Quit trying to feed me that bullshit," Mandy responded, her voice taking on an aspect of growing anger. "I _know_ you want it. I _felt_ your erection. Quit trying to play pretend for the benefit of the witch."

_I don't want anybody else_  
_When I think about you, I touch myself_  
_Oh, I don't want anybody else, oh, no_  
_Oh, no, oh, no_

Jealousy and a sense of protectiveness had been taking over the dark empath, but now she had been insulted as well. Her black aura began to encase several objects throughout the room—most notably the stereo—as her emotions grew ever more powerful. Most of the people in the room did not notice this, but Rose Wilson did. Seeing what was happening, Rose recognized at the very least that, whatever the cost, her mission for the night had been accomplished. Now it was only a matter of the aftermath.

Beast Boy, meanwhile, was also quite angry. To insult him was fine, he was used to it, but _no one_ should _ever_ call Raven a witch! Regardless, he still recognized there was nothing he could do. And while these thoughts were running through his head, Mandy forced him into a kiss. Knowing that she'd choke him if he didn't comply, he begrudgingly returned the kiss. As she broke the kiss, the athletic girl began to grind her pelvis into his in a manner that resembled dry humping more than anything. Beast Boy tried to protest, but Mandy once again pulled the ring on his collar. Both Raven and Rose were pretty much sure that enough was enough

_I want you, I don't want anybody else_  
_And when I think about you, I touch myself,_  
_Oo, oo, oo oo, ah_

Reaching, for the first time, _into_ the changeling's pants, Mandy commanded him, "you're going to fuck me right here and right now, and that's not a request or a proposal." She removed her hand to begin unzipping his fly.

_I don't want anybody else_  
_When I think about you, I touch..._

At that moment, the stereo exploded. Beast Boy, though very much in shock over what he had just experienced, took this opportunity to make his escape, transforming into cat and running away at full speed as Mandy and Candi both were dazed in confusion over what had just happened. He found safety hiding behind the two female Titans. For Rose, the game was over—she was sure Raven was no-longer in denial, and Candi's and Mandy's advances on her friend had really gone _way_ too far, so she was now on the same page as Raven on the matter of keeping them away from Beast Boy.

The spectacle had left Raven, for her part, absolutely seething in rage. She did not transform fully into her demonic form, but both the pupils and whites of her eyes turned a glowing red and her facial features formed a violent snarl. As the overzealous cousins returned to their senses and lunged toward the direction of the three Titans, Raven blocked their path to Beast Boy, and exclaimed in a frightening demonic growl "_**mine!**_" Previously inhibited by her denial, she was now assertively putting her foot down.

Walking toward the cousins, Raven took a threatening tone and posture. "Unless you seek intimate knowledge of why you should fear the dark, leave **_now_**! And **_never_** return!"

"You heard her," Rose backed Raven up, eyeing Candi and Mandy with a cold look, "leave, and don't ever even think about returning!" Most of the fangirls immediately complied with the demands of the two intimidating women, but the cousins weren't quite so convinced. Raven was sure to escort them out, though. Or, rather, she looked at them threateningly while walking toward them, and they backed themselves out. As Raven dealt with letting the guests out, Rose attended to Beast Boy.

"Hey," she shook the changeling to get his attention, "you okay?"

"I think so," he nodded as he snapped back to reality. "That was just...damn. No matter how many times I told them no..."

"Why didn't you stop them?" Rose asked, in a voice she'd hope didn't sound judgmental.

"Well," Beast Boy began his reply, "there really wasn't anything I could do. I couldn't use my powers, because they're civilians. I couldn't use all of my physical strength, because they're women."

"Did you happen to hear any of what Rae said to them?"

"I was kinda spacing out," Gar replied. "I heard her tell them to leave, but not much else. Why?"

"Oh. No Reason." The white-haired teen was devious enough to orchestrate this entire episode just in order to force Raven into a state of so much jealousy that it became impossible for her to maintain her self-denial about her feelings for the changeling, but she wasn't so inconsiderate in her meddling as to tell Garfield that Raven was possessively attracted to him. Besides, that would probably be too much for him to handle at the moment, and it would really be best if the two navigated the uncharted terrain of their bond by themselves from this point. She did feel a weird twinge of guilt that she would leave both of them knowing that they loved the other, but unaware that the other would even be remotely interested in them, though. Still, she felt her mission for the night was accomplished.

Returning to the room, Raven was _not_ happy. "_**Rose!**_" she shouted in an angry tone. "May I have a word with you in private, please?" she asked in a calmer voice, but the twitching of her eyelids gave away enough about the demi-demoness's state of mind that the normally-fearless daughter of Slade Wilson actually gave a nervous gulp before following Raven out of the room.

Sitting alone while trying to gather his thoughts, Beast Boy could hear Raven screaming at Rose. He couldn't actually understand what she was saying, but he didn't really need to; he could tell that Raven was extremely angry and he had a pretty good idea what she was angry about. To be honest, he didn't blame Rose for what happened—he figured she was just trying to give him a good time, and there's no way she could have anticipated the level of craziness that Candi and Mandy would bring to the table.

"I swear," Rose said as the girls re-entered the room, "I had no idea that was going to happen." Beast Boy gave a sigh of relief that Raven hadn't killed the white-haired teen.

"It doesn't matter," replied the empath, still fuming over what happened. "You should have actually vetted the guests," she had a point, although Gar was himself still choosing to be more forgiving. _'I felt his fear,'_ Raven thought to herself—her empathic senses had momentarily taken a backseat to her own emotional conflict when it was happening, but she was still an empath. She could still feel a very conflicted cocktail of emotions coming from the changeling in the present. "Are you okay, Gar?" she stood next to the seated male, placing her hand on his shoulder.

"At the moment, I'll probably need some time to sort everything out," he replied, "but I'll be okay." Beast Boy rose to his feet and gave a yawn. "I think I'm going to go to bed, actually. Good night, ladies."

As Beast Boy departed, Raven knew he wasn't really confronting what had happened. He had repeatedly said no, but those girls had kept pushing further and further, and if she hadn't have blown up the stereo and intervened they probably would have ended up having sex with him against his consent. Regardless of how one wants to sugarcoat things, he was almost raped. But then, she recognized that perhaps men had to deal with such an issue differently.

She recalled that men are typically unwilling to consider themselves victims of sex crimes, though. It never helped that the standard response when a man claims to have been raped is for it to be taken like a joke, and machismo also had a hand in the matter: it certainly seemed that there was something emasculating about such an experience. The mockery that he certainly would face if any of the male Titans ever found out was itself more than enough for her to understand why he didn't want to confront the matter. She didn't like it, but she understood why he wanted to bury it.

"Okay, I'll let you live," Raven said to the room's only other occupant. "But under one condition: what happened here tonight stays between you, Garfield and I. I don't want you telling anyone about what happened. If I hear anyone joking around about this and find out that, I will send you to a oxygenless dimension. Understand?"

Raven had been known to say such a thing as an idol threat in the past, but when Rose looked in the empath's eye, she found nothing but a cold seriousness; she meant it this time. "Yeah," was the only reply she could muster at this point.

"Good," the empath responded, "because there are certain things that I love doing and certain things that I hate doing, and, while I've never killed a friend before, I'm pretty sure it would be one of the things I would hate doing." Rose looked at her with a face emoting hope. "Yes," Raven added, "we're still friends. I'm just disappointed right now."

"I'm going to go meditate," Raven said as she began towards the door, "it's getting late and I'm going to need to get my emotions under control before I'll be able to sleep." Stepping out of the room, Raven suddenly remembered something and poked her head back in. "Oh, and Rose," she said, "I know what you were trying to do tonight. Don't ever do it again."

"Okay," Rose replied, "but did I accomplish my goal?"

"Well, I wouldn't say that you didn't, but I don't want Gar to know any of this right now. Got it?" Rose nodded, and with that Raven proceeded to her room. She was tempted to take a trip to Nevermore, but decided against it seeing as she already knew what her emotions were feeling. What she really wanted to know was why, but that question could wait. It took just two hours of meditation before Raven gained sufficient control of her emotions to try to sleep—she'd been getting better over the years. Yet, now, as she laid her head down, the final thought on her mind was of the green changeling who unknowingly had her heart.

* * *

**Author's Notes  
**Again, I'm not entirely satisfied with the way this chapter turned out, but I don't see it getting better. This seems to have some of the least believable plot elements of the entire work to date, but I wanted to create a dramatic moment to push Raven's jealousy and protectiveness to the point where she could no-longer maintain her denial of her feelings for Beast Boy. Also, when the whole part where Beast Boy was probably a few minutes away from being raped came up, I suddenly found myself having trouble writing it because those kinds of scenes involving males on the receiving end are usually played for laughs, while I wanted to subvert the "Double Standard: Rape, Female on Male" trope. Though, I felt that a complete aversion would have been somewhat unrealistic (in reality, claims of female-on-male rape are often laughed at), but I tried to lampshade things to provide an explanation to why it wasn't treated the same way as it might have been if the genders were reversed. I also invoked the tropes "All Men Are Perverts" and "A Man Is Always Willing" in the rationale behind Candi and Mandy's actions.

_**Hairul The Nightrage Beast-**_Nope, not hookers. Just really zealous fangirls. Basically, what Rose was trying to do was use the fangirls to stoke Raven's jealousy to the point where it would undermine her denial, which, as it turned out, worked despite some unfortunate side effects. As far as the BST goes—I will note, however, that it should be presumed that the same passion that underlied the Belligerent Sexual Tension still exists in the time of this story, but has perhaps been forced a little deeper as the two matured.

_**shugokage-**_Thanks. I hope it continues to be a good read in future chapters as well.

_**McDiggity-**_And here it is, the very next day. :)

_**Annatheavidreader-**_Cyborg was gone for the weekend. It just turned out that this particular weekend in the story occupied a hell of a lot of chapters! lol But, yeah, the next chapter will be set a few weeks afterward, so Cyborg will be back in LA by then, although he is not going to have a major role in the chapter (it's going to be more BBRae fluff, but important BBRae fluff at least).

_**JasonVUK-**_Well, to be honest, this chapter was the one I was most worried about.


	14. Chapter XIII: I Won't Be Afraid

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Teen Titans_, nor do I own the 1986 film _Stand by Me_, nor do I own the 1961 Ben E. King song "Stand by Me."

* * *

**Ascension of the Beast**

**Chapter XIII**

**I Won't Be Afraid**

Raven had never been one for large birthday celebrations. Her eighteenth birthday party was an exhausting affair, attended by the Jump City, Steel City, Toronto and Mexico City Titans, a few honorary and reserve Titans, various long-time allies from the JLA and Doom Patrol, and a few dates of the aforementioned guests. In all, there was Dick and Kori, Vic, Gar, Wally and Jinx, Karen and Mal, Roy, Garth and Dolphin, Más, Menos, Leonid, Toni, Kole and Joey (who actually ended up hooking up _at_ the party), Gnarrk and Lilith, Rosabelle, Wildebeest, Isaiah, Rose and Bart (who, while not being a couple per se, did seem to really hit it off), Cassie and Conner, Donna and Terry, Mia, Holly, Dawn, M'gann, Zatanna, Bruce, Tim and Stephanie, Babs, J'onn, Steve and Rita, Cliff, Larry, etc., but Raven's favorite guests were Timmy Tantrum, Teether, Melvin, and, of course, Bobby was there too.

If anyone had made the mistake of robbing a bank or causing some other trouble in Jump City that night, they would have been in for one hell of a nasty surprise; but the evening was actually marked more by conflict between Titans. An argument between Cassie and Rose nearly derailed the entire party, and certainly ruined any chance of a good time for the empath in whose honor it was thrown. Then there was also a friendly pranking competition between Vic, Gar and Garth, which really got way out of hand—the three boys were apparently having fun the whole time, but they were annoying almost _everyone_ else. Then it got worse when M'gann, thinking it looked like fun, joined the boys' competition as well, and—apparently not having completely learned her lesson from the pie incident with Rose—ended up making the mistake of pranking the damn Dark Knight. Luckily, Bruce understood that the Martian girl was still quite naive about Earth customs and etiquette and took the incident in stride. Raven wanted desperately to wring Gar and Kori's necks for throwing the surprise party—in fact, after all the guests left, Vic and Dick had to restrain her from doing so.

A year later, Raven was much more pleased with her nineteenth birthday. No party, no night out, just a simple dinner with friends. This time around, the attendance list was much shorter, consisting only of herself, Gar, Vic, and Sarah Simms, whom Vic had invited to spend the week in Los Angeles.

Raven was also enjoying some new attire this year, as she had chosen a few days before to retire her leotard and add a sleeveless gown to her uniform in its place. This was not the first alteration she had made to her image, as she had decided at the beginning of the year to let her hair begin to grow out more, with the objective of allowing it to once again achieve the length it had randomly grown to when she defeated her father. Both of these changes were made for basically the same reason: the leotard and shoulder-length hair had suited her in adolescence, but now she was a woman and wished to present a more mature image. It was all part of her transition from teen to adult.

The gown seemed to fit her perfectly. The fabric was colored midnight blue, nearly matching the color of her cloak. Its contours perfectly accentuated her breasts, while not exposing the slightest cleavage except for a tiny corner of side boob where the fabric transitioned to its backless form. The slits on both sides of the gown went up to her hips, allowing her legs sufficient freedom of movement. Although the slits were risking quite a bit of attention, the gown went all the way down to her ankles. The final pieces, however, were added to her ensemble on her actual birthday, in the form of gifts from Gar, who gave her a pair of low-healed midnight blue pleather thigh boots (of the haute couture variety, rather than the fetish type he might half expect BB to buy for a woman) and a pair of elbow-high midnight blue evening gloves. Suddenly Raven had a uniform that could reasonably double as formal wear, but what astonished Cyborg was that she seemed to truly love the gifts Beast Boy had given her—adding them to her uniform instantly upon receiving them.

The fact of the matter was that in the weeks succeeding the fangirl incident, the green and grey pair grew closer than ever, which did not go unnoticed by a bewildered Cyborg. Most of the changes were minor, but he had noticed a few big ones as well. For instance, Beast Boy seemed to have become more clingy toward Raven than ever, as if he was mortally afraid of something and only felt safe in her presence. Indeed, during the intervening weeks since his return to LA, the only time Cyborg had seen either of them in the absence of the other was when Raven sat him down to tell him the full story of Beast Boy's childhood traumas that Monday evening. Even when he was extracting blood from the changeling—which had become so common that the green Titan had probably given about a full body's worth of blood by now—Raven was always sitting by his side, and holding his hand to help ease his issue with needles.

It wasn't particularly abnormal for the changeling to shadow the empath—in fact, it had pretty much been Beast Boy's modus operandi to frequently bug Raven when they were younger. But what Cyborg saw now was more like they were tethered together by some invisible bond, and what really made him raise an eyebrow was that Raven, far from trying to push Beast Boy away, seemed to be enjoying having him near her. And even when he did something that might have caused her anger in the past, now she was far more patient with him than he'd ever seen before. Unaware of what transpired during the weekend he was gone, he began to assume the most likely answer he could think of.

"I bet you fifty bucks they're in some sort of romantic moment when we get back," Cyborg said to Sarah as he started the T-car's engine. The two had decided to go out on the town after dinner. She thought about it for a moment before offering her response to the proposition.

"Okay," she replied as the car left the driveway, "but what exactly are we counting as a 'romantic moment'?"

"Well, since they're not dating, we should probably go with a really broad definition just to be safe," Cyborg noted. "Like, if they're just having the sort of intimate conversation a couple of purely platonic friends who have no romantic feelings for each other at all might have, that doesn't count. But if we come back and they're cuddling on the couch, or spooning, or kissing, or making out, then you have to pay me my $50. And if they're doing more NC-17-rated stuff, then you have to double it."

"No, that's not fair!" Sarah replied. "If you can win $100 but I, at most, can only win $50, that's not a fair bet!"

"Okay, how about if they're in an argument and Raven is on the verge of ripping BB's head off, then I pay you $100? That work?"

"Yeah," Sarah responded. "I don't really like being on the side that's rooting for violence, but I guess it's a fair bet now," she laughed. "I'm in."

Raven was watching from the window as the couple drove off. The empath loved Victor Stone as if he was her big brother, but lately she had developed a tendency to desire more one-on-one time with the animorph who she had recently discovered possessed her heart. Vic, who could never be brought into the loop with regard to the fangirl incident, was suddenly an obstacle to her more intimate conversations with Gar, so she now often found herself (guiltily) counting down the minutes before she and her elf had the house to themselves. However, as she watched the T-car leave, she noticed something was not as it should be.

"Hey, Rae," Beast Boy partially interrupted her focus on the issue at hand, "do you wanna watch a movie or something tonight?"

She nodded almost absently. "Go pick one out. I'm going to quickly take care of something."

"Er...is something wrong?"

"No," she replied, "don't worry about it. Just go pick a movie and I'll be back before it starts."

Beast Boy felt like she was hiding something from him, but his instincts were screaming at him that it was probably something he didn't want to know about. Letting it go, he complied with her request and went to go pick a movie. As soon as he wasn't looking, Raven picked up a conspicuously present iPod which had been sitting on the coffee table, and proceeded to teleport to her destination of choice.

Hiding behind some bushes at the property line, Candi and Mandy were definitely testing their luck by going anywhere near the Logan McMansion. "We're getting your iPod back," Candi said to her cousin, in an determined tone.

"I know you want me to get it back," Mandy responded "but I kinda feel like we're asking for trouble even coming back here. Don't you remember how pissed Raven was?"

"I'm not scared of her."

"I am! I mean, she definitely has the ability to do everything she threatened to do, and to be honest, I wouldn't blame her at this point if she did." After having a few weeks to think about it, Mandy concluded "what we did was wrong. I mean, he said no over and over...if we were guys and he was the girl, we'd be in jail right now."

"Good point." Candi was also feeling a small, tiny, barely extant sliver of guilt. "But I'm still not afraid of the witch..."

"**_You should be!_**" said a familiar, rage-filled voice. Looking behind them, they found what appeared to be Raven in her semi-demonic form—she still had her basic human appearance as far as her limbs and torso went, but her face now bore four glowing red eyes. Except for the color of her cloak, she really most resembled Rage at this point—the girls were doomed.

Both of the blondes showed obvious signs of fear, but Candi was still brazen enough to speak. "We don't want any trouble! We just want to get my cousin's iPod back."

Using her powers, Raven restrained the objects of her anger with bands of black energy. Pausing for a moment, she tossed the object the women desired to Mandy. "I hope you have your earbuds on hand, because you're going to want some music to distract you where you're going." She paused for a moment. "Who am I kidding? It isn't really going to matter anyway. Just do me a favor: if you run into someone named Belial, tell him his sister sends her regards...and that I'll give him the same treatment I gave our father if he sends you back."

Manifesting a portal beneath the blondes, Raven released her powers and allowed gravity to take care of sending them to their destination. "Oh, and by the way, I'm not a witch, slut!" she said as the portal closed. "She'll learn the difference between a demon and a witch soon enough," the demi-demoness said to herself.

Returning to her more human form, Raven decided to walk back into the house. _'I wonder what movie Gar picked,'_ she thought as she reached the front door. _'I know he probably picked something I don't like, but I _really_ hope it's just not some mindless comedy. I love him, but if he chose something stupid and pointless...'_

She was relieved to find that the film he had chosen, from what she'd heard about it, was not entirely mindless. Then again, she wouldn't yet be able to say for herself that such was the case—despite the fact that this particular coming of age dramedy had been filmed more than two decades earlier, she'd never actually seen the film. This was in spite of the fact that it was based on a novella by one of her favorite authors.

"_Stand by Me_?" she asked.

"Yeah," Beast Boy replied. "I figured you might like it. It's based on a story by Stephen King."

"I'm sure that's not why you own a copy of it. I know how you are with reading."

"Well," he replied, "to be honest, you're kinda right. You know how big of a Corey Feldman fan I am. Even if his role in this movie isn't exactly the coolest character."

She knew very that he was indeed a big Corey Feldman fan. There'd actually been an entire week a couple years back when every sentence Beast Boy spoke quoted Edgar Frog, Feldman's character from _The Lost Boys_. It was interesting watching him try to match the right quote for the context of the situations. She was pretty sure the changeling owned a copy of every film Corey Feldman was ever in.

_Narrator: "Teddy Duchamp was the craziest guy we hung around with. He didn't have much of a chance in life. His dad was given to fits of rage—one time he held Teddy's ear to a stove and almost burned it off."_

"That's a pleasant image for a film starring a bunch of twelve year olds," Raven quipped. Raven didn't really say anything about it, but she quickly found herself enjoying the film. She'd read _The Body_—the novella the movie was based on—and, between Teddy's absolutely horrible father, the fact that everyone expected Chris to be bad, Gordie's emotionally distant parents, and Vern's antagonistic older brother, she couldn't help but identify deeply with each of the characters.

She was also beginning to see Beast Boy in each of them as well. In Chris, she saw Garfield the leader. In Gordie, she saw the potential for what Garfield could be if he exercised his mind a little more. In Teddy's passionate defense of his father in the junk yard scene, she was reminded of Garfield's die hard loyalty, which often was literally to a fault (such as when he refused for so long to give up on Terra, despite the fact that she had at one point been on the verge of actually _killing_ him). _'Idiot,'_ she thought as she remembered that incident, _'but he's _my_ idiot; even if he can never know.'_ As for Vern...well, the elements of that character which reminded her of Beast Boy were not necessarily the kindest of things._  
_

_The movie's four protagonists were crossing a train bridge, completely clueless as to when the next train would be coming through. Scared out of his mind, the fat one, Vern, was crawling on all fours, lamenting the loss of a comb that he didn't really need to begin with, seeing as he had a buzz cut. Gordie, the smart one trapped behind him, suddenly had a bad feeling. Looking back, he placed his hand on the track, feeling for vibrations. Not a fraction of a second after he squeezed the rail, he heard the chugging of the steam locomotive. Looking back once more, he saw the black smoke rising above the crowns of the trees._

_"TRAIIIIIN!" yelled Gordie, prompting all of the boys to look back as the train rounded the corner into view._

_"Oh shit!" exclaimed Vern, as he proceeded to...crawl faster._

_"Get up Vern, damn it!" Gordie yelled as he forced Vern to his feet, "get up! Move it!" Vern proceeded to run about five feet before tripping. "Oh shit! Vern, get up! Come on, man!"_

_Paralyzed__ with fear, Vern replied almost crying "I don't wanna, we're gonna fall!"_

_"We're gonna die, damn it! Get up!" shouted Gordie before getting Vern to his feet again._

Watching as the boys in the movie hightailed it across the bridge, Raven suddenly became herself for the first time in weeks. "After having been _your_ battle partner so many times, I can really understand what Gordie's going through there," she wisecracked.

"Ye-Wait! Hey!" Beast Boy responded, realizing in half-word what she meant. "I'm not really _that_ bad, am I?" he asked as a frown formed on his face. "I mean...if I'm that much dead weight, why even keep me around?" he was taking the comment too seriously—much more seriously than he ever would under normal circumstances—and she could tell as the tone of his voice sunk and his speaking became less energetic.

She placed her hand on his shoulder, comfortingly. "Dead weight or not, you're my friend," she said, as she tried to get around what she was going to say next. For years she had been trying never to repeat the statement, for years she had been afraid doing so would only encourage him to be more annoying. Then again, for the past month or so, he really hadn't been himself anyway. "And...well...and, usually," she paused for a second before mumbling incoherently.

"What?" Beast Boy asked, for once not trying to tease her, but actually unable to understand what she said.

"I said," she paused with a sigh, "I think you're kind of funny. But don't let that go to your head, because I _will_ keep the promise I made the last time you pranked me!" It was about six months prior. The prank was extremely elaborate and left her covered from head to toe in paint and feathers. Ironically, considering what she'd done to Candi and Mandy just a little while before this memory came to mind, she'd threatened to send him to literal Hell if he ever pulled a prank on her again—even going as far as to open an actual portal thereto to illustrate the point.

"And, I was kidding. For the past couple years or so, you've actually been one of the most skilled heroes I've ever seen, but there was a time when you were, at times, kind of..." she searched for the right word to use without hurting his feelings again. _'He wouldn't know what anencephalous means, would he? Oh, wait...biology is one of his strong points. Shit! Not really accurate either—it's not that he doesn't have a brain, he just didn't really use it that often. Dumb would be too blunt, and also kind of inaccurate. Daft? No, doesn't really fit. Impetuous? Yeah, I'll go with that.'_ "...impetuous, before the whole Brotherhood of Evil thing made you use your brain."

"Hey," he said, "I promised I would never prank you again. I don't exactly have damnation insurance!" Raven rolled her eyes at the bad joke, but was at least happy that she could repair the unintended damage her own joke had done. She was really hoping he would get back to normal sooner, though, but she supposed that was too much to ask for, considering everything that had happened since the year began—from a country he'd had such a deep connection to being thrown into a temporal hell, to losing one of his earliest mentors, and finally being sexually assaulted by a pair of overzealous fans. And it was only February!

"Uh, Rae?" the changeling said, as the movie was nearing its close, after a long span of the two Titans just silently watching.

"Yes, Gar?"

"I've been thinking for the past couple weeks, and I don't think I'm comfortable staying in LA anymore after all that's happened," he said. "I wanted to be around for your birthday, but I kinda wanna move to Steve and Rita's place in East Hampton. They don't use it anymore, since they have more of a sentimental connection to the place in Midway City, but I think I'd feel more comfortable there now." The biggest thing factoring into his decision ended up being the large number of fangirls who now knew where he lived—he didn't feel safe living in his LA home anymore.

"Oh," was all she could say. To be honest, she was shocked out of her mind by this and didn't really know what to feel. Although she was certain it was accidental—improvements be damned, Gar still had a tendency to not think things through as much as he should at times—his timing was definitely the worst as far as saying what he said while watching this particular film went. Not more than three seconds after Raven replied to the changeling's statement, the narrator began talking about how the four kids in the movie had drifted apart and gone their separate ways. This made her think about the state of the Titans.

Dick and Kori were gone—lightyears away. Although it would hurt, if Vic were to decide that he wanted to leave to go live with Sarah, Raven would eventually get over it. But Gar was a different story; for years, she had unknowingly allowed him to get away with things no one else could. For years, she had allowed the changeling to test her boundaries in his effort to draw her out of her solitary stoic state. No one ever knew why, but she saw it now. It was there even on that first day they met, when she told him she thought he was funny—that was not something she'd ever done before, nor did it particularly fit her personality. She tried for years to keep him at arm's length, but at the same time she could never allow him to be any further away than that either. The two of them as individuals had deep scars which stunted their personal growth, as their respective defense mechanisms forced them to extreme positions.

More alike in life experience than one would immediately have recognized, their personality differences did not actually make them opposites, but rather they were as parts of the same whole. Under normal circumstances, he was her hyperactive, effusive, light yang, and she was his passive, stoic, dark yin. Their similar life experiences bound them, while their differences in personality complimented each other, bringing balance. She realized now that she had herself been a major force in his maturation. So too had he been a driving force in her growing sociability, forcing her to come to terms with social contact even when she wanted to lock herself away from the world. They strengthened each other where they were weakest.

On the emotional level, she could not bear to lose him. Indeed, this had been why she didn't tell him how she felt. She was afraid that he wouldn't feel the same way, and it would destroy their friendship. She also figured that, after what happened with Candi and Mandy, the thought of a woman being in love with him, like she found herself to be, might scare the living crap out of him. But now he wanted to move to the other side of the continent, and if she didn't want to lose him. She had to think fast. It especially affected her as the movie's narration spoke of Chris's fate—the thought of having Garfield fade out of her life and then end up dead (which very well could happen in the near future considering what he was planning) scared her even more than the thought of negative reactions to him finding out about her feelings for him. She had to be there to protect her Garfield, for in his death she truly would lose him forever.

"What about Vic and I?" Raven asked, hoping to dance around the issue to the point of staying near him without telling him that she needed to be near him._  
_

"You guys can stay here for as long as you want," Beast Boy replied.

"It just seems odd that you would want to move away so suddenly," she noted.

"I know," he responded, "but after what happened with those girls at that party, LA, like...scares me."

"Well, I'm pretty sure you'll never see those two again," she said while moving her arm around his shoulder in a gesture very unlike her normal self, but which she'd gotten used to over the preceding weeks. The tone of her voice had an absolute certainty that the words themselves didn't quite impart. She had not told him about what happened earlier that day—needless to say, he definitely would never see his attackers again. Somehow, that certain tone did seem to help him. He certainly became more comfortable, leaning in to rest his head on her shoulder. Four years ago she would have sent him out a window for that gesture, but now _she_ was actually enjoying his proximity to her.

_When the night has come_  
_And the land is dark_  
_And the moon is the only light we'll see_  
_No I won't be afraid, no I won't be afraid_  
_Just as long as you stand, stand by me_

"I'm going with you," Raven said as the credits began to roll. "I swore by Azar that I would be by your side, and I intend to keep my promise."

"But..." Gar did not know how to react to this. After the past few weeks, he'd been sure she'd have been getting tired of his continuous company, and he needed to have enough space to keep from ruining their friendship by disclosing his feelings. But, at the same time, he also was not any more happy about the prospect of being apart than she was.

_So darlin', darlin', stand by me, oh stand by me_  
_Oh stand, stand by me, stand by me_

"...are you sure this is what you want? New York is a long way away." As he thought about it, he quickly warmed up to the idea of her coming with. _'It's not like we'd be smothering each other,'_ he thought, _'that place is big enough that we probably wouldn't even need to see each other everyday if either of us needed time alone.'_

To be honest, her loyalty and compassion had been one of the few bright spots in his life during that still-young year. Then again, that had always typified their relationship—at the end of the day, no matter how many times she insulted him or how many slaps she gave him, he knew she cared and she would never abandon him. Even if he asked her to abandon him in his time of need, she would still do anything to make sure he was alright. That's the kind of friend she was with all of her friends—her introversion tended to make displays of affection a rarity, but she was always caring when it was really needed. No matter what, all of the Titans knew she cared about them. He knew he couldn't say no—he needed her.

_If the sky that we look upon_  
_Should tumble and fall_  
_Or the mountains should crumble to the sea_  
_I won't cry, I won't cry, no I won't shed a tear_  
_Just as long as you stand, stand by me_

"If you're going," she said as she eased the changeling into an embrace, "I'm going. After all I've seen and all of the experiences we've shared, I'm not going to just let you fade out of my life like that. And I'm _definitely_ not going to let you go to Lamumba alone, either."

_And darlin', darlin', stand by me, oh stand by me_  
_Oh stand now, stand by me, stand by me_

As the song broke into an instrumental bridge, Beast Boy reciprocated Raven's embrace, resulting in what one would have to call a cuddle under any context. The combination of his close proximity and the romantic/nostalgic tone to the string solo had a peculiar effect on the empath, forcing a flood of memories to overcome her mind. She remembered the moment they met, the debate about that silly mask of his, the first time he'd protected her in battle, the first time she'd seen him seriously injured, that damn chicken he won her, his and Vic's refusal to leave when Trigon was on the offensive in Nevermore, the first time they played chess with each other (surprisingly, he had her in check three times and managed to take two-thirds of her pieces—including her queen—before she finally got him into checkmate; she later learned that Mento had taught him the game and the Doom Patrol men used to frequently play it with him, in order to improve the boy's strategic thinking), carrying him around the first time they faced Mad Mod, the time the Titans almost lost him to Soto, the day they met Terra, the night of Terra's betrayal, the moment Terra nearly killed him, the moment he called her creepy, his concern for her during her seduction by Malchior, the moment he told her she wasn't alone, the incident with Adonis and the Beast and its immediate aftermath, his insistence upon throwing her a birthday party for her sixteenth birthday, the penny he gave her for luck, his jubilation when she confirmed that she was truly herself following the defeat of Trigon, the Japanese fangirls who pursued him, the ultra-flirtatious attacks upon him from Nya-Nya, and many examples of his flirtatious banter and terrible (yet still, she now begrudgingly admitted, endearing) jokes.

With each memory that flashed in her mind's eye, she also felt the adjoining emotional responses she had in the moments. The relief from the moments when he was her guardian. The fear from the moments when he was in danger, which in the instance when he was nearly taken by Soto was also colored with some guilt for having refused to make time to spend with him. The sentimental appreciation she never openly admitted feeling when he gave her gifts or tried to do things for her. The hurt she felt when he called her creepy and that time he exploded at her while under the influence of those chemicals. The deep and very open appreciation she felt for him when he told her exactly what she needed to hear after Malchior broke her heart and when he saved her from Adonis. The hope his penny represented. The only recently-recognized jealousy she felt around Terra, and later in Japan. The protective rage she felt when Terra was on the verge of killing him. The embarrassed, bashful and very secret flattery she felt every time he'd direct his flirty demeanor toward her.

_Darlin', darlin', stand by me, oh stand by me_  
_Oh stand, stand by me, stand by me  
_

The totality of her memories and the feelings they invoked, together with the warmth emanating from his body, made her feel secure and, well, content. She basically went into autopilot at this point; or, rather, Affection had apparently taken over, as Raven unconsciously pulled Beast Boy into a closer snuggle.

_If the sky that we look upon_  
_Should tumble and fall_  
_Or the mountains should crumble to the sea_  
_I won't cry, I won't cry, no I won't shed a tear_  
_Just as long as you stand, stand by me  
_

He was still mostly conscious of what was happening, but that was fading fast. Initially, he found Raven seeking this much physical contact to be weird, but he wasn't exactly going to complain. Potential consequences were nagging the back of his mind, but he was too wrapped up in the moment to really heed his more fearful side's warnings.

_And darlin', darlin', stand by me, oh stand by me_  
_Oh stand now, stand by me, stand by me  
_

As the song went into another string solo, Gar had his own flood of memories. He remembered the first time she told him she thought he was funny, the moment she invited him to room with her in her old apartment, the first time he'd seen her in danger, the first time she protected him, her helping him back to the Tower after their first disastrous confrontation with the H.I.V.E., that first time she healed his leg, his interactions with Happy, Timid and Brave in Nevermore, the conversation where they found out that although each thought the other didn't like them they actually did like each other, her snapping him back to reality after he was hypnotized during their first confrontation with Mad Mod (although he had to protest because it was at his expense, he actually did think the joke was funny), the emotion in her voice when she told Terra that if she killed him it would "be the last thing [she'd] ever do," his annoyance when Raven would become angry at him when he only wanted to include her in activities, the surprise he felt when Raven hugged him after the Malchior incident (and the frustration he felt when Cyborg killed the moment), the fear and self-doubt he felt when everyone was telling him he'd hurt her in his werebeast form, the comforting conversation they had after she woke up, the feelings of fear he felt when it was believed that she was dead, the determination he felt to defeat her father (even going so far as to use his werebeast form, which he was normally too scared to use), the relief he felt when she returned to her normal self and defeated Trigon, the embarassment he felt when she learned his real name, the adorable sense of helplessness she was exuding when it came to babysitting a certain trio of superpowered children, the triumphant feeling that took him over as she, Cyborg and Starfire showed up during the fight in Paris, and various other things. It was a hell of a trip.

_Darlin', darlin', stand by me, oh stand by me_  
_Oh stand, stand by me, stand by me_

Compulsion took over the both of them as the emotional residue of their memories drew them closer still on the emotional plane. As the song began to fade out, the two chromatically-challenged Titans each found their eyes trapped in the other's. Unable to break the gaze, the emotional connection overpowered their conscious minds. Acting on emotion and instinct now, they drew closer until their lips were barely half a centimeter apart, when...

"BOOYA!" a familiar voice shouted from behind them. As Gar and Rae jumped away from each other and tried to pretend what just almost happened was just a construct of his imagination, Vic was very full of glee for having just won a $50 bet. Raven and Beast Boy were decidedly less pleased.

"I...uh...I think I'm going to go...uh..." Raven said with a voice uncharacteristically full of hesitation. She was very obviously thinking a lot about each word she used, trying to will herself out of this situation. "I'm going to go meditate," she finally said, as she got up and fled to privacy of her room.

"I...uh...think I'm gonna go to bed," Beast Boy said after Raven left the room. It was obvious that he was just using that as an excuse, though, as it was still very early in the evening. Usually Gar, who had been notably affected by the nocturnal instincts of much of the Animal Kingdom, wouldn't be going to sleep for at least another six hours.

As the other two Titans fled to their respective bedrooms, Cyborg couldn't help but laugh. He'd known something was up, and now as he and Sarah returned from their night out, they found Gar and Rae cuddling on the couch on the verge of kissing.

* * *

**Author's Notes  
**If you're paying attention, Raven's uniform is at this point more like a composite of her uniforms from the comics than her uniform in the cartoons (although I'll note that her hair and skin still remain the same colors as they were in the 2003-2006 cartoons). I did that mostly just because I like the gown better than the leotard, though it did give a good opportunity to provide a piece of exposition on the evolution of her relationship with Gar. Suddenly, either he (hypothetically) knows exactly what to get her for a gift, or she (actually) just treasures what he gives her, but the dynamic has shifted nonetheless.

I wrote Gar as being a fan of Corey Feldman; this actually has a bit of basis in canon—in _Teen Titans Vol 3 #15_ (Nov 2004), Beast Boy described his own acting career by comparing it with Feldman's, stating that he was "like Corey Feldman but with super-powers." I also wrote Raven as a Stephen King fan which, while not having any canonical basis that I can think of, does seem to be one of those things that floats around in a lot of fanfics which really seems to fit her perfectly.

There's an interesting connection between _Stand by Me_ and _Teen Titans_, though: Wil Wheaton, who played Gordie Lachance in _Stand by Me_, did the voice of Aqualad in _Teen Titans_. But I did not even realize that connection existed until _after_ I wrote Beast Boy and Raven watching that movie, mind you.

Also, Candi and Mandy have voided their Karma Houdini Warranties. Didn't think I was gonna let them off the hook, did you?

I'm also hoping to get the abnormal situations which are impacting Beast Boy's and Raven's personalities resolved so that I can have Raven actually acting like Raven and Beast Boy actually acting like Beast Boy soon. There seems to be a lot of agreement that Raven's normal MBTI type would be either INTJ or INFJ, with tv tropes settling on listing her as an INTJ (which makes a lot of sense). As far as Beast Boy's personality goes, there's a lot of disagreement, but tv tropes lists him as an ENFP (which, he does seem to exhibit a lot of ENFP traits under normal circumstances). But it's starting to bug me that, for most of the story thus far, I've had both of them acting pretty OOC (albeit that's not entirely unreasonable given the stresses the story has created for them; it could be explained that they're acting according to their shadow functions).

_**CheeseJellyBean-**_Thanks for the favorite. Glad you liked that chapter, and I hope the rest of the story pans out. As far as Candi and Mandy go, I was wondering if I was pushing it a little far, but I really wanted to portray them in an especially depraved light in that chapter (then in this chapter you see them realizing they were wrong, but it's too late and Raven ends up dispensing with them anyway). I'm glad you think the adult content was tasteful _and_ evocative; my main concern with writing adult content in general is that I don't want it to be smutty, while I'm also trying to avoid making it boring while making it tasteful—for lack of a better word, 'refined eroticism' is what I'm shooting for in general when I write an adult scene. In this particular case, though, I was shooting more for horror than eroticism, though; putting BB in a situation where he had absolutely no control. And in that horrifying situation, I was also aiming for social commentary as well.

_**Hairul The Nightrage Beast-**_Well, their luck ran out in this chapter...

_**shugokage-**_Thanks. I figured I wanted to have Raven be forced to come to terms with her feelings for Beast Boy in a situation that had socially meaningful contexts.

_**JasonVUK-** _Well, I would figure BB would handle that traumatic experience like he's handled others. He'll be quite uncomfortable in situations that remind him of it, but he's skillful enough at compartmentalizing his traumatic memories that I see him taking it much better than most people would. Moreover, I've intentionally written him feeling safer in Raven's presence—whether that's because he actually does feel like she'll protect him (which, we see in this chapter, she certainly _will_), or whether she might be using her empathic powers to 'eat' some of his negative emotions being entirely up for interpretation for the time being—as a way to kind of hopefully work around the trauma from that particular experience.

_**Annatheavidreader-**_I kinda wanted to work some socially conscious content into the story, so it was intentional that that particular chapter be on the more serious side, and it certainly won't be the last of the chapters that are like that (though I do not plan on exploring the subject of rape again in this story). I agree with you completely that it seemed wrong that Candi and Mandy were basically Karma Houdinis in that chapter, which is why I actually decided to write their scene in this chapter (needless to say, they're out of the story for good now). As for whay Gar is suddenly conscious of his emotions, I'm not really sure if I'm going to explore it at all in the story itself, but the way I figure it is that when Raven was in his mind, she left behind a piece of her soul self, which interacted with the Beast, who of course interacts with the other aspects of Gar's self, and then the traumatic situation he was experiencing the moment his emotions began interacting like that was a catalyst forcing it all together. I figure Raven's soul self's interaction with the Beast opened up the Beast to becoming a channel for Gar's other emotions, seeing as the conversation Raven had with him at the end of "The Beast Within" indicates that he could sense the Beast within him anyway...Raven gave it a bit of a push via her presence, while the experience the following evening pushed the interactions over the edge.


	15. Chapter XIV: A Greater Mischief than Des

**Disclaimer:** I do not now own, nor have I ever owned the rights to _Teen Titans_. The characters portrayed herein are the intellectual property of DC Comics, Inc., a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., which is itself a subsidiary of Time Warner Inc. I make no claim of ownership thereto.

* * *

**Ascension of the Beast**

**Chapter XIV**

**A Greater Mischief than Despair**

Immediately upon entering her room, Raven quickly locked the door and leaned breathlessly with her back against it, hand over her heart. She'd said she was going to meditate, and she surely intended to, but she also needed time for reflection. "Was that what I think it was?" she asked herself. "Did we really almost kiss?"

The situation was a surprise to her. She had been cognizant of her feelings for the changeling for a couple weeks now, but as far as she ever knew, she wasn't really his type. "No, that couldn't have been it. He likes blondes. He likes girls who will give him all of the attention he wants. I could never give him the attention he needs and he knows it. We almost kissed, but maybe he's just not thinking clearly. He hasn't been himself lately."

Then it dawned on her. "Neither have I!" she proclaimed in a voice full of concern. Walking to her bed, her mind was now full of doubt. Doubt of what he could possibly feel for someone like her, and doubt of what she had been thinking she'd felt for him. "The stress he's been under changed his personality," she concluded. After thinking for a moment, she quickly turned her attention to her bookshelves. Walking over, she selected a large volume pertaining to the subject of personality psychology.

Psychology had always been something that had interested Raven. Partly because the psychological states of those around her had always affected her via her empathic powers, but there was more to it than just that—within her personality, there had always been an innate curiosity about how things worked and what made people tick. In addition to her volumes on magic and her recreational reading materials, she had also accrued a large number of theoretical works dealing in matters of natural science, physics, engineering, philosophy, law (which became particularly important, given her former career), computer programming, medicine, and, yes, psychology. As an interesting side note, her interest in these topics actually helped to cement her relationships with her teammates—her interest in natural science brought her closer to Beast Boy, her interest in physics brought her closer to Starfire (who, despite her naivety with regard to terrestrial customs, was absolutely gifted in her understanding of this particular field), her interest in law brought her closer to Robin, and her interests in engineering, computer programming and medicine had brought her closer to Cyborg.

Surprisingly, when she took up an interest in philosophy and psychology, it had been Beast Boy more than any of the others who seemed interested in these topics. Then again, as asinine as he could be sometimes, Garfield also always had a remarkable curiosity about the world to him. She remembered a line David Keirsey had written, which she thought perfectly fit the changeling under normal circumstances: "not unlike puppies, sniffing around to see what's new and then barking to let everyone know what they've found."

Raven had picked up her first book about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator about a week after she turned seventeen; she devoured the contents of its nearly three hundred pages in the space of two days, during which she had only set the book down when she had to sleep or go out on a mission. Over the next month, she acquired many more books about the subject. As her knowledge grew, she began to type herself and her teammates. She determined that she was herself an INTJ, which was an exceedingly rare type, especially among females. Dick, she determined, was an INFJ—her companion type, which made a lot of sense within the context of her friendship with the leader. Kori was an ENFJ—her tribesman type, which informed of her own relationship with the Tamaranean. Also of interest, Raven recognized that, although ENFJ was not the ideal match for an INFJ (then again, she didn't know any ENTP women), Kori and Dick were nonetheless a healthy coupling, seeing as they thought and felt much the same way, except that Kori was more extraverted and had the ability to draw Dick out of his isolation whenever he closed himself off from the world. Raven figured that Vic was an ENTJ, which was, interestingly enough, her 'pal' type.

Gar, she determined, was an ENFP, which had bought her relationship with the changeling into context—which showed a surprising amount of similarity between his and her cognitive functions, but of course with some important differences. They both had intuition as their dominant functions, but her intuition was introverted, while his was extraverted. They both had sensing as an inferior function, but his sensing was introverted while hers was extraverted. Moreover, her secondary function (extraverted thinking) was his tertiary function, while his secondary function (introverted feeling) was her tertiary function. Overall, this meant that they thought and felt much the same way, except that each had insights and strength that the other lacked, he drew energy more from social interactions while she drew energy from introspection and alone time, and feelings had more priority to him while rational thought had more priority to her.

Carrying the book with her, she began to thumb through its pages as she sat down at the foot of her bed. Finding a section about reactions to stress, she suddenly had a revelation. "That's what happened!" she exclaimed. As it turned out, under extraordinary stress, cognitive functions can reverse their order of dominance. In this case, the reversal transformed Beast Boy's normal functions of Ne-Fi-Te-Si to Si-Te-Fi-Ne. "The stress has basically turned him into an obsessive and awkward version of an ISTJ," she noted to herself.

"But why have my functions reversed too?" she asked herself, as she got up from the bed "Either my empathy is acting up, or I genuinely do care for him. Damn it, Gar! Why do your problems always seem to become mine?" Returning the book to its shelf, she next retrieved a familiar mirror from her dresser. _'I suppose now would be as good a time for a conference as ever,'_ she thought to herself, before looking into the magical item.

* * *

For some time, Knowledge and Wisdom had both recognized that this moment was eventually going to occur. During the preceding weeks, Raven had not been acting anything like herself. She was feeling more than usual, she wasn't analyzing things as much as her nature would normally require, and frankly, they were largely responsible for it. Sure, the stresses created by the situation with Beast Boy helped, but, in truth, Raven's emoticlones were more actively engaged in this situation than the empath consciously knew; and the twin aspects representing Raven's more cerebral aspects had actually planned this entire exercise to begin with. The events which occurred since New Year's Day were merely convenient catalysts; Nevermore had known the subconscious truth of Raven's feelings for the changeling for years, and its inhabitants had been waiting for the perfect moment to bring it into the conscious realm.

Seeing all of the bad things which had happened in Garfield's past had provided just enough stress to eliminate Raven's resistance, allowing Knowledge and Wisdom to switch the order of dominance of Raven's cognitive functions. This action basically switched Raven personality from a stoic, inexpressive INTJ to a warmer, more emotional and more emphatic ESFP. Of course, the switch making her more extraverted had its side effects; Raven became less introspective during this time and hence the last time there had been any communication between her and the aspects of herself which comprised the inhabitants of Nevermore was on the night of Rose's party, but the heightened priority of the feeling function really made such communications unnecessary, as it was extraordinarily easy for the emotions to have their way in her decision-making process.

Which, of course, had been the intent of the switch to begin with. All of the emoticlones admired Garfield, each for her own reason, but all of them forming a coherent whole which expressed a cause which actually could be explained in rational terms, if Raven ever gave them the chance. The problem, of course, was that Raven's denial was so strong that she never would have. Knowledge and Wisdom had calculated that Raven's denial could be worn away if her emotions were given a stronger role in her decision making process, so they made it happen; what they did not anticipate, however, was that they had unknowing allies in the outside world. Nevermore collectively owed Rose Wilson a great debt of gratitude; they'd been expecting a slow process, but Ravager place Raven in a situation where her jealousy and protective instincts could quickly and easily overcome her denial.

But the switch had always been on shaky ground. To be honest, Raven was _not_ actually under enough stress to warrant such a change in her personality; it had been an artificial action undertaken by Knowledge and Wisdom in order to fulfill a specific purpose. Since the change did not occur naturally, they knew it was not going to hold for very long. Just one moment of introspection could reverse the entire thing; and now that moment had come. However, knowing that this moment was eventually coming gave them an opportunity to prepare for the backlash in Raven's conscious mind.

Looking around the table at the other personifications, Wisdom knew they were ready. Well, all of them except for Timid, that is—the feed from Raven's conscious mind was _really_ messing with Timid right now, who didn't know what was what and was very scared. Still, conveniently seating her green-cloaked sister near her was helping to allow her to keep her composure.

"What the hell has been going on here," Raven, extremely annoyed, chose to dispense with the pleasantries of any greeting, not even allowing the personifications of her aspects an opportunity to welcome her as she entered the conference room in Knowledge's library. "Why was my personality so different?" she asked, looking to Knowledge and Wisdom with an extremely serious look in her eye.

"Please, Raven," Knowledge began, "have a seat and we will explain everything." The empath, wanting answers, begrudgingly complied with the personification of her subconscious intellect's request.

"You know very well how shadow personalities work," Wisdom noted, without mentioning _why_ Raven had reverted to her shadow type for two weeks. "Too much stress and you become an ESFP, just like how too much stress has turned Garfield into an ISTJ. You needed to turn inward to gain the mental energy to switch back to your normal personality, which you did when Victor interrupted you and Garfield before you could complete what we certainly believe was most likely going to be a kiss."

"But I've been under worse stress than that before, and the only other time I can remember this happening was when the World was going to end," she noted.

"We've been foregoing any repetition of the things you saw while you were inside his mind, to avoid traumatizing Timid and Affection," Wisdom noted. "But rest assured that what you saw truly had more effect on you than you remember. Moreover, the experience of watching him as he was nearly raped and not doing anything about it until Rage and Affection intervened with a display of protective jealousy is also another major source of stress, both in the form of empathic emotions felt for him and guilt."

"But, why?" Raven asked the question that was nagging her conscious mind the most. "Why would I love him? How can I even be sure that I actually do love him? I never thought I loved him until I was under the effect of that personality change!"

"If it's a question of whether or not you love him, you're asking a very pointless question," Wisdom noted. "Your emotions are unanimous on this topic; every one of them adores him." Raven raised her eyebrow in a gesture that invoked more sarcasm than inquisitiveness.

"As much as it pains me that I can't hate the stupid elf," Rage noted of her own emotional conflict, "the zen bitch is right. Even _I_ love him." Rage's emotional conflict was quite apparent as she was speaking, as she emoted melancholy when she spoke of being unable to hate Garfield, yet lust as her mind turned to his furrier alter-ego while she explained that she cared for him as well. It was certainly disconcerting for Raven to watch this—Rage should not have any ability to feel either of those two emotions. Or, certainly not melancholy, at least.

"If you want, we can go around the table and tell you exactly why each of us adores him," Wisdom noted.

"Alright," Raven said as she panned her vision through all of the personifications in a counter-clockwise motion. "We'll start with...er...Sloth?" she said as she looked at the emoticlone seated to her left. This was odd—she never sat next to Sloth (mainly because that emoticlone constantly smelled like the time she escaped wasn't the only time she'd gone dumpster diving). Either way, Sloth would go first...

Except Sloth did nothing. In fact, she was laying her head on the table, using her arms as a pillow, while snoring somewhat quietly. "Sloth," Raven said as she began to shake the emoticlone, "wake up!"

"But Azar, I don't wanna train today," the still-sleeping emoticlone said in a groggy voice. As Raven continued, Sloth finally awoke. "What?"

"What do you like about Beast Boy?" Raven asked the brown-cloaked emoticlone. She was not even remotely pleased, but being a sloth was kinda Sloth's thing.

"Oh, that's easy," the emoticlone replied. "He'll never look down on you for expressing me. I mean, seriously, you could go a week without a shower and he'd probably still want to be your bad-joke-telling shadow. And he'll never think any less of you if you act like a couch potato or sleep in or make a mess, or anything really," she said before yawning and laying her head back down again.

"Well, to be fair, he'd have think there was something wrong with sloth and sloppiness before he'd ever think less of us for anything like that," noted the orange-cloaked emotion who was next in line to answer, "and he's not exactly Mr. Clean, or very active for that matter."

"Okay, Rude," Raven said with a slightly more satisfied voice, "I'm pretty sure there's nothing you like about him, so please tell us why this is a bad idea."

"Sorry mistress," Rude said with more than a little sarcasm, "I actually _do_ like him. I mean, her illustriousness the princess of Air-Freshener-Land over there is probably gonna say a lot about how sweet and cuddly he is, but let's face it, the guy isn't the most polite person you'll ever meet either. He'll tease, he'll prank, and more often than not, his verbal filter will fail catastrophically, and you of all people, Raven, should see the value in this. He doesn't sugarcoat things, he says what's on his mind. He is normally the absolutely most candid person we can really say we know."

"Okay-" Raven said, being cut off by Rude before she could finish the thought.

"And let's be honest," remarked the orange Raven, "he has the cutest ass of any of the male Titans, with the exception of perhaps Garth, and I will bet you anything that Garfield is _hung_. I mean, seriously, he's got the entire Animal Kingdom locked away in his anatomy. He's got sharp claws, he's got pointy ears, but I've never seen hooves, or a mane, or any feature from a horse. Where's the horse in him? I'll tell you where—it's in between his legs!"

Rude's rant about Beast Boy's phallus visibly frightened Timid, who took cover cowering behind Brave. "Damn it, Rude!" the green-cloaked emotion interjected, "you scared the shit out of the poor girl. Don't worry Timid, I'm sure it's not _that_ big."

"Yeah, uh, Rude," Raven was a bit distracted by the thought of Beast Boy's penis, but she was keeping herself mostly grounded in the conversation nonetheless, "that was...um...inappropriate."

"In what reality would it be appropriate for _me_ to be appropriate? Inappropriate is kinda my thing—me being appropriate is like weepy over there being chipper or Happy thrashing shit. It just wouldn't be right." No one could argue that Rude didn't have a point. "Besides, we all know your little secret—you _love_ thinking about sex."

"Be that as it may, this was an unproductive line of conjecture," Raven noted, trying to keep the situation under control. To be honest, she couldn't deny that she loved thinking about sex. From the moment she entered puberty, this had been one of her deepest secrets. More specifically, she loved conceptualizing the different ways love could be made, devising different theories and creative ways to achieve truly exciting sex. Though, she was hampered by a lack of real-world experience in that regard. She used to dismiss her sexual thoughts as a manifestation of her demonic heritage, but when she started learning about personality types she ended up learning that this was actually not unheard of for humans of her personality type either. More troubling, though, was that Rude's comments about the changeling's genitals gave her ideas that she now couldn't get completely off her mind.

"Your turn, Rage," a somewhat flustered Raven declared, "why on Earth would you love Garfield, of all people? I would have thought you hated him."

"I did hate that little shit once," Rage noted, "but ever since the Beast saved us, I've found myself unable to feel more than just mild annoyance toward him. That Beast is just _soooo_ damn sexy; I mean, where else have you ever seen that kind of raw, primal passion? Nothing—not even our own teammates—could stop him from smiting _anything_ that threatened us. The Beast likes smiting, I like smiting...there's just too much common ground there for me to ever hate the Beast. I love the Beast. And since the Beast is nothing more than a feral aspect of that green idiot, I guess I have to love him too."

"I like him because he can kick some serious ass and he's so fearless in battle that it's almost like he's got a death wish!" Brave wasn't waiting for anyone to tell her it was her turn. "I mean, he doesn't go all out a lot, but when he does, holy shit! Even if an enemy can bring down the Boy Wonder, the Green Machine'll still bring them the beat down!" Brave was making various hand and arm gestures with an energy level that made Raven wonder if the green-cloaked emotion had been smoking meth before the meeting, but the empath was really most irked by her emoticlone's use of the term 'Green Machine.'

"And, you know, we now know he was _always_ like that. I mean, when we saw his memories, the whole thing with the snake and his mom. Even as a little kid, he was able to snap to action quick enough to save her life and absolutely destroy that snake!" Brave added, still displaying way too much energy. "He's almost as powerful as us, Rae. If we hooked up with him, we'd be like the most epic battle couple ever."

"B-b-battle s-s-s-scares me," Timid responded. "B-but h-he does m-make me feel safe! An-and he m-makes me feel less sad. A-and I feel r-really safe around th-the Beast."

"He always knows how to have fun!" Happy added, with an energy level that made her look like Brave's tweaking partner. "And he's always trying to include us in it, too. Remember when he actually convinced us to dress as Robin? That was wicked fun! And, as much as the rest of you hate his jokes, he can be funny sometimes too. Like, I know how much reminders of Terra are hated around here, but remember that first day we met the blonde traitor? Beasty Boo couldn't even say his own name. Bass Boot! That was hilarious!"

Waiting for her pink-cloaked sister to finish, the purple-cloaked emotion added her part, "and that's part of the thing about him. He can bring us out, he can free us. And for some reason he can do it without there being that many negative consequences. Seriously, Rage is definitely the most powerful of your emotions, but even she seems to be able to direct herself against him without destroying everything. He can bring joy, spontaneity and creativity to our life. He can anchor us closer to our humanity. And most importantly, he has always been very loyal to us."

"But what makes him so special?" Raven asked. "A lot of guys could probably do that."

"To be honest, I don't know," Affection replied, "I have never felt this strongly about anyone before—not even he who's name we don't mention. But it's hard for me to really describe my process; you have to remember, I'm an emotion after all."

"But Affection does hit upon some important points," Wisdom added. "And our relationship with Garfield is really symbiotic. He keeps us grounded in our humanity by making it easier for us to feel, and we keep him in line and give him stability and direction. If we combined our minds, we'd probably have an unstoppable intellect, actually. He doesn't think with a lot of depth, but his breadth of thought is amazing sometimes. We, on the other hand, do think with a lot of depth, but it helps to have him bringing some of the ideas he picks up with his breadth of thought, for us to analyze it with our depth of thought."

"And let's not forget what insight the field of personality psychology has to offer," Knowledge said. "Everyone from David Keirsey, to Azar knows how many MBTI theorists have provided very compelling arguments in favor of ENFP and INTJ being each other's _ideal_ matches. Of course, this doesn't mean that it would instantly work, but it does mean that those two types have a better chance of success with each other than either has with personalities of other types. You're both intuitives, so you think in basically the same language. Our introversion means that we create our own mental energy, which his extraversion can then latch onto and draw into the open, serving as part of the basis for our bond with him. A relationship with two judgers is like a ship with two captains, with a constant conflict over dominance; in a relationship between a judger and and perceiver, each has their own role, with the judger giving opinions and making decisions and the perceiver considering the judger's opinions and giving feedback. And then there's the thinker/feeler distinction; our strength is rational and analytic, his is emotional and moral. In a relationship with Garfield, Raven, you would be the brain and he the heart; he would benefit from your intelligence and rationality, while we would benefit from his emotional warmth and that self-sacrificing nature he shares with us. As long as we can be considerate and sensitive to his needs, respect the differences between us and him, and consider his needs, and as long as he can be direct and honest, respect the differences between him and us, and consider our needs, there's no reason in the world why it wouldn't have the potential to be _the_ perfect relationship. And the process to getting to the point has been ongoing for the past four years; we're already pretty much there."

"But he's not even an ENFP anymore," Raven retorted, weakly. She couldn't argue with what Knowledge and Wisdom were saying—she knew better than to try to dispute their points. Of course, that didn't mean her present argument was strong either.

"Garfield has only been acting like an ISTJ recently because his mental energy has been so tapped by the stress he's been placed under that he had to revert to his shadow type," Wisdom noted. "And even then, his ENFP true self has shown through the cracks a few times as well. I don't think it will take much to bring him back."

"Since he is an extravert, he gains mental energy from social interactions," Knowledge noted, "and I do believe there is a major social gathering coming up pretty soon on our calendar."

"Bruce Wayne's wedding?" the question was kind of pointless, considering this was actually the only social event on their calendar at the time.

"Think about it, Raven," Knowledge replied, "there will be no shortage of friendly and familiar people in attendance, with whom Garfield can mingle during the reception. I'm not a gambler, but I'm willing to wager he'll be back—more or less—to normal before even the first dance."

"And I would suggest that you find a moment during that night to pull him aside and tell him how you feel," Wisdom added, "to find a better time in the near future would be extremely difficult."

"But I probably won't even be able to get his attention," Raven retorted. She did not have to elaborate, for all of the aspects present knew what she was thinking.

"B-B-Bette K-Kane will b-be there," Timid noted, in a tone that emoted a mixture of sadness and hopelessness.

"That blonde bitch better keep her hands off from him!" Rage interjected._  
_

"I'm sure his feelings for her are purely platonic," Wisdom noted. "They're good friends, but he has never indicated or shown any signs of any romantic attraction toward her, and we've never seen her show any romantic interest in him either."

"I think she likes Matt," Happy was very excited for the opportunity to gossip.

"I could see that," Rude noted. "She'd never be as sickeningly hopeless for him as she used to be for Dick, but I could totally see it." Rude also loved gossiping, mainly because Raven thought it was impolite.

"Enough with the damn gossip!" Rage, on the other hand, found it annoying. "All that matters is that she keeps her mitts off from our man."

"Don't worry, sisters," Affection joined the fray, "I'm sure he loves _us_. He almost kissed us tonight, remember?"

"And remind me to throw that damn half-robot out a window the next time I get a chance," Rage added.

"B-but what i-if it w-was just h-his horm-m-mones, and h-he d-d-doesn't really l-love u-us?" Timid voiced her concerns.

"I understand your concern, Timid, but I don't think that's the case," Affection retorted.

"_Enough_!" Raven was finding the back and forth between her aspects quite annoying. "I'll tell him how I feel the next time we're in an appropriate moment, okay? Can we leave the matter at that?" All of the emoticlones quickly accepted her decision, although Timid was still quite scared and Rage was still exhibiting violent tendencies toward the thought of anyone getting between her and her Beast. "I have another question, and this will be more along Wisdom's and Knowledge's fields of concern. I really meant to ask the last time I was here, but as you recall, things were kind of a mess then. Why don't I have an animus?"

"The simplest answer is that you do, but it's too weak to manifest into a personification of its own," Wisdom responded first.

"He's manifested his own personification before—primarily whenever we've achieved emotional harmony," Knowledge added, "but otherwise he has always tended to be weak and his functions are usually divided among the rest of us."

* * *

**Author's Notes  
**I figured that this chapter would create a break from the story's emotional undertones. It also provides a nice opportunity for me to say this without it hurting too much: after a lot of thought, I've decided that the rule of "Anyone Can Die" will be in effect in this story and all of its sequels, and that when a character conclusively does die, "Killed Off for Real" will be effective within the entire storyline of this fic and all of its sequels (so anyone who dies anywhere from the beginning of this fic through the end of its last sequel will _not_ be returning at any point in the timeline...that is not, however, to preclude characters who apparently died, but their deaths could not be confirmed in story, from returning later). ACD's reach includes both Raven and Beast Boy as well, even though they are the two main characters. I'll say that it's unlikely that I'll kill either of them off in this fic, and especially unlikely that I'll kill Raven off, but it could still happen and I'm not presently sure who all is going to die. I have decided on some characters who are going to die within this story, and there's going to be serious tearjerker moments in a lot of those cases, but I'm not sure of the totality of it all.

I'm also ready to confirm two things about the overall series. Firstly, although I'm not going to spoil exactly _who_ or _how_, one of the five core Titans will die early in the first sequel; but this character will remain vitally important to the foregoing plot of the series, even in death. Secondly, I intend to eventually write a side-story about Robin's and Starfire's time on Tamaran, which will not be a true sequel to this story because it will occur simultaneously within the in-story timeline. The first true sequel will be both a sequel to this fic and to that fic.

Anyhow, this chapter has a very clear theme related to Raven's character development. I had been intending to have a chapter taking place during Batman's wedding reception be the fourteenth chapter, but I ended up deciding that Raven needed a moment to pull her back into her natural personality (which, due to a few years of maturation, will still be slightly different from that she had in the series), and particularly to restore her cognitive functions to her normal Ni-Te-Fi-Se set and re-engage her left brain (which had been abnormally submissive to her right brain for much of the story so far). I figured the immediate aftermath of the almost kiss would be the best timing for this to occur, and I used the basis that (ironically, considering how INTJs naturally tend to avoid the feeling in question) Raven touched onto a kernel of doubt in her feelings about Beast Boy, and as a result ends up having to analyze her potential with him.

_**pikachewy1-**_ Thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed review. As far as the bit about Beast Boy's backstory went, I decided that I wanted it to be very emotional; I'm usually a very rational introvert myself, so I set the bar to where it would actually evoke an emotional response from myself when I wrote it. If I wasn't welling up when I wrote it, I wasn't satisfied with it, and that's the result of using that criteria. As far as Beast Boy not transforming during the Candi and Mandy ordeal—I figured that if he transformed into something too big, he could hurt them (which...he'd catch flak both for being a man who caused physical harm to women and a metahuman who caused harm to physically-normal civilians); if he transformed into something too small, they could hurt him; I already used the amoeba bit and didn't really want to use it again in the same chapter; finally, I would figure it wouldn't be so abnormal for the weirdness of the situation to kinda paralyze him (he has been known to freeze up when nervous). Albeit, none of those explanations is particularly strong. As far as the hole with Raven and Rose goes, there's no rational reason for them to have let that happen, but this chapter kinda subtly lampshades that at one point. Finally, as far as the Lamumban situation goes, I don't want to say too much, because at this point it would be a spoiler, but the sorts of concerns you invoked have very much been on my mind.

_**Lover of A Good Story-**_ I agree completely with your argument, but felt I had to lampshade the United States' alcohol consumption laws at that point. Had they been almost anywhere else in the developed world, having a drink now and then would not be a problem for them at all at this point, though.

_**Hairul The Nightrage Beast-**_ When you look at Corey Feldman's filmography, there's actually _a lot_ of films Beast Boy could conceivably like. I mean, seriously, _Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter_, _Gremlins_, _Friday the 13th: A New Beginning_, _The Goonies_, _Stand by Me_, _The Lost Boys_ (and both its sequels), the 1990 adaptation of _Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles_ (and its sequels), _Bordello of Blood_, etc. etc. are all films I could totally see BB **LOVING**.

_**Annatheavidreader-**_ I'm normally an INTJ myself, although I've had to fight against my own personality in writing a lot of this story (for example, if I let my perfectionism take over, the prologue probably wouldn't even be complete yet). I think my personality's actually part of why I find myself writing more often from Raven's POV—I can understand BB for the most part, but I can understand Raven better. It's also part of why the OOCness is bugging me personally, as I do what to get to a point where it's showing off the ENFP/INTJ dynamic. As far as Belial goes, that mention of him was the closest he is going to get to being introduced into this fic, though I will note that at least one of Raven's paternal relatives will actually be present as a minor character in this fic (for a clue: BB's going to experience some minor confusion). I can see what you're saying about the impracticality of a gown in combat, although, to be fair, it's not quite as impractical as it would have been if Raven relied as much upon physicality as Gar and Dick do. But I more or less just wanted to move Raven and Gar closer to their wardrobes from the comics as a way to mark an easily perceived difference between them as adolescents and adults (and Gar's eventual wardrobe change is actually going to have major significance to some things in the plot).

_**LiumD-**_ He was just too excited about winning that bet.

_**JasonVUK-**_ I was actually considering three possible endings for that chapter. Of course, I went with the ending that had them on the verge of kissing but being interrupted. The two alternatives I considered would have had them actually kissing, or just cuddling, but I ended up deciding the almost kiss was the best choice to go with.

_**tsk91-**_ I'm actually using it more the further I get into the story, too.

_**shugokage-**_ Thanks. This chapter (intentionally) probably won't pack the same punch as that one did, but I'll say that you can look forward to seeing some more fluff next time around.


	16. Chapter XV: Unintended Consequences

**Disclaimer:** All the characters used in this chapter are the intellectual property of Time Warner, Inc. I own nothing.

* * *

**Ascension of the Beast**

**Chapter XV**

**Unintended Consequences**

Unintended consequences can be quite surprising. When we think of the concept, it is common to usually associate it with unforeseen drawbacks or perverse results, such as when Prohibition actually resulted in an explosion of organized crime or when the Peltzman effect causes people to be more complacent and take more risks where safety measures have been put into effect. There is, however, another side to the concept—sometimes actions will have unintended benefits.

When the Teen Titans defeated the Brotherhood of Evil in Paris, it did not go unnoticed by either side of the war on metahuman crime. The Brotherhood was not a minor threat by any means, and groups such as the Justice League and the Doom Patrol found themselves regarding the teenage heroes with much more respect afterward, treating them as peers rather than subordinates (even to the point of sharing their deepest secrets to keep the Titans on the same page). The Teen Titans had certainly been on the Injustice League's radar since the defeat of Slade Wilson, but the destruction of the Brotherhood of Evil caused them to tread ever more carefully when the Titans were involved (which was a reasonable reaction, as the Titans were not inhibited by the same rules which restricted the Justice League from interfering in terrestrial affairs, and were certainly strengthened by a greater degree of solidarity). The reaction of the League of Assassins, however, was perhaps the most interesting of all.

They did absolutely nothing. For years, the League, which comprised many of the best assassins and mercenaries in known existence, had constantly been plotting to bring their leader's vision for the world into fruition by any means necessary. It should be noted that Ra's al-Ghul, as far as his objectives went, was never especially evil—all he ever really wanted was to create a new order in which humans lived in harmony with the natural environment. The problem had always been in his methods, in that he was willing to kill billions of people in order to make it reality. Ra's was never an aimless psychopath like the Joker, for example, tended to be. Rather, he had always been the epitome of a well-intentioned extremist—holding to a worthy ultimate objective, but willing to do anything he had to in order to make it happen, no matter what the collateral cost might be.

When Ra's al-Ghul and the League of Assassins suddenly dropped off the radar, Bruce Wayne's initial reaction was to suspect that it was a ploy of some sort. Ra's, by his very nature, was an extremely stubborn man; once he was set in his ways, it would take something unimaginable to change his mind. But as the months turned into years and Ra's made multiple promises that he was not going to pursue his ends through his more familiar violent means anymore, Bruce ultimately had a single thought which changed his entire perspective on the matter: Ra's was a man who highly valued honor and had very deep respect for Bruce himself; while Ra's was certainly capable of using some ethically questionable tactics, and would willfully omit facts and bend the truth at times, Bruce could not identify a single instance in which Ra's had actually told him a direct lie. Nor could he identify any real motive for Ra's to lie to him—Ra's knew him well enough to know that the Batman was notoriously paranoid and untrusting. Ra's was not stupid enough to think that Bruce would believe him if he lied to him, so the entire enterprise of telling such a lie would not be worth the effort.

This, of course, still left a major unanswered question. As stubborn as Ra's was, his opinions would not change unless something very big had forced them to change. Whatever it was, it seemed that the defeat of the Brotherhood of Evil was the watershed. Whatever it was, Ra's wasn't spilling the beans. Bruce could not even be sure that most of the other members of the League of Assassins knew what had changed the Demon Head's mind about the tactics of how he intended to achieve his utopian vision. Wayne was certain that his bride had to know what it was, but, always a daddy's girl, she wouldn't tell him either.

Whatever the precise cause of Ra's al-Ghul's change of heart was, it had a massive impact on the course of Bruce Wayne's life. Bruce had first met the ecoterrorist's daughter on an odd occasion just over a half decade earlier. Ra's wished to track down the men who murdered his wife, and Bruce ultimately aided him in this mission. It was during this mission that Ra's introduced the Batman to his daughter, Talia al-Ghul. From first sight, both Bruce and Talia were absolutely smitten.

Between the knowledge of his daughter's feelings and the fact that Bruce was the only man in the world who Ra's truly respected as an equal, Ra's certainly approved the match. "The world's oldest chauvinist," as Bruce often characterized him, Ra's had an obsession with gaining a male heir to his legacy; the Demon Head's problem with this being that his only progeny were two daughters. Hence, Ra's pinned all of his hopes for gaining the male heir he wanted on Talia reproducing. In Bruce he saw a man who he felt was worthy of fathering his heir; hence, he actively wanted the Dark Knight to mate with his daughter. Beginning on a mission during which Ra's and Bruce worked together to rescue Dick Grayson and Talia from a disgruntled Ebeneezer Darrk, the Demon's Head made several overtures to the Dark Knight over the years requesting that he marry his daughter.

Of course, matters were complicated by the fact that Bruce and Ra's were enemies. Talia was often torn between her loyalty to her father and her devotion to the man with whom she'd fallen in love. Bruce, always a master at figuring out what was going on in others' heads, was completely cognizant of this reality. In part to save Talia from the conflict of interest in which she would be placed, as well as to protect himself from potential vulnerabilities she might cause, Bruce went against his own affections for the woman, continuously turning down her father's pleas. For as long as the Dark Knight and the Demon's Head were enemies, Bruce Wayne and Talia al-Ghul could not be wed.

But now things were very different. When the League of Assassins ceased its terrorist activities, Ra's al-Ghul ceased, for all intents and purposes, to be Bruce Wayne's enemy. Their war was over, and though Bruce could still not fully trust his father-in-law-to-be, it was nevertheless now possible for their houses to be joined in such a manner.

The actual wedding ceremony was a public event. Bruce Wayne the attractive billionaire was at the top of the social pecking order in Gotham and was, prior to this day, easily the most sought after eligible bachelor in the country, so it was only natural that the public would want in at some point. Then again, although Bruce had been the most desired bachelor in America, he paled in comparison to his bride, whose beauty stole the day. That's not necessarily surprising, however, as Talia had always been very richly imbued with the gifts of great beauty, great intelligence, great business sense, and great skill in battle. That foursome really made it impossible for the Dark Knight _not_ to fall for her; she was his equal in every way. That's not to say it was always good—their lovers' quarrels took on dimensions unknown to any normal relationships.

The reception would be an entirely different matter. Bruce calculated that, although someone would have to be certifiably insane to attack this particular event, the reception would be more vulnerable than the ceremony. Neither the Batman nor his bride had any shortage of adversaries whose sanity was questionable—in fact, there had just six months prior been a major escape from Arkham Asylum and several of its residents were still at large—so it made sense to be careful. The reception would only be open to a number of superheroes, their spouses and dates, and the father of the bride and his manservant (who were conspicuously absent anyway, which was to be expected as Ra's had completely divested himself from his activities—legitimate and otherwise—in the United States). This was primarily to prevent harm from coming to civilians should some villain be demented enough to attack a venue full of some of the most skilled and powerful fighters in the world. As an extra measure of control, the couple decided upon Wayne Manor itself as the venue for the reception.

Still, with his ever-alluring bride by his side and all of the security matters at some point on his mind, even at the beginning of his own wedding reception, Bruce could not help but ponder upon what exactly changed the Demon Head's mind. His uncharacteristic inability to figure it out was really beginning to annoy him.

* * *

"...in the end, it was either going to be her or Selina, and, between the two of them, Talia was the only one who was okay with playing second fiddle to Bruce's...er...nocturnal activities," Zatanna Zatara was explaining the reason behind Bruce Wayne's choice of Talia al-Ghul as his bride to a somewhat distracted Raven. The nature of the relationship between the magician and the demi-demoness had changed markedly over the years. Initially Zatanna distrusted Raven as she had sensed her demonic heritage—it didn't really help things that Raven was attempting to hide that particular element of her ancestry from the Justice League. Due to Zatanna's distrust of Raven, the Justice League as a whole refused to trust her for a long time, but it actually ended up being Beast Boy, Cyborg and Starfire who changed that.

Two years prior to the present festivities, there had been a sudden burst in supervillain activities. The Justice League was swamped to the point where Batman had to call upon Dick for help. Of course, the Justice League didn't trust Raven, so she was left to her own devices. Not long after Robin had to depart to aide Batman, Superman's body was possessed and the Justice League ended up having to call upon the Titans to help him regain his body. Among the Jump City group, Beast Boy, Cyborg and Starfire all volunteered to help; although other Titan groups also sent help, to the effect that there were somewhere between ten and fifteen Titans on that particular case. After that event, Superman befriended all of the Titans who helped him.

After that, Superman began to make frequent visits to all of the Titan teams. One day he helped the Jump City team apprehend a very disheartened Dr. Light, who'd just gotten out of jail after previously having to face thirty Titans. The Man of Steel was impressed by how afraid the villain was of Raven in particular and, after Beast Boy told several stories about her exploits, began to form a friendship with the empath herself. Superman ended up convincing Wonder Woman to join him in visiting the Jump City Titans a week later, and the Themysciran ended up bonding with the Azarathian over their common ground of having both been products of pacifistic societies with matriarchal and relatively egalitarian social structures. Wonder Woman thereafter ended up defending her new friend to Zatanna, who was otherwise the princess's best friend, and working to convince her to give the empath a chance.

At the same time, the Doom Patrol requested the help of Beast Boy and Raven on a mission that had to do with a paranormally empowered villain; Mento also called John Constantine in for help. During that mission, Raven ended up winning Constantine's respect (which says a lot, considering his own history with demons), and Constantine ended up joining the chorus of voices trying to convince Zatanna to give the Titan a chance. With her best female friend and her long-time on again/off again lover both putting pressure on her, Zatanna eventually relented; when she finally did give Raven a chance, the two hit it off surprisingly well. Indeed, as soon as Zatanna got over the fact that Raven was half demon, they became friends.

The friendship aside, Raven was only half listening to Zatanna at the moment. By no means did the Azarathian have any lack of respect for the Justice League reservist who was now basically trying to talk her ear off, but Raven was never one for small talk. Besides, her attention was presently set upon someone a little more... green. Gar was on the other side of the ballroom, immersed in conversation with Clark Kent and Lois Lane-Kent. Apparently, the changeling was cracking jokes, as the Kryptonian was almost blue from laughing. _'I wish I knew what the hell he finds so funny about Gar's jokes,'_ Raven thought. _'Have I just not been getting it all these years, or is it just that Superman happens to share Gar's horrid sense of humor?'_ Regardless, her divided attention in no way meant she was ignoring what Zatanna was saying._  
_

"Not that it really matters anymore," the magician added to what she had been saying. "Ever since the crackdown, Gotham has been relatively safe. I think the last time Bruce set foot in the Batcave was like three weeks ago." The most recent escapes from Arkham ended up being the straw that borke the camel's back, as far as the State of New Jersey was concerned. Within 24 hours after the incident, an entire National Guard battalion was on the asylum's premises, and within a week the state had exercised its eminent domain powers to statize the facility outright. Problematic staff were promptly terminated and state employees installed in their stead. It wasn't as if all had turned good, though—although the majority of the escaping residents had been caught within the first 48 hours, the list of patients who were still at large was quite disheartening: the Joker, Harleen Quinzel, Pamela Isley, Victor Fries, and Lyle Bolton, none of whom having been heard of since. Still, everyone in the Batman's periphery was sure that it would only be a matter of time before these stragglers were rounded up, and recent reforms had cleaned up most of the corruption in the GCPD and left the department more than capable of handling normal crime.

"It also helps that the blushing bride's father decided to relocate himself and all of his assets to Cairo a few months ago," the magician added. "Pretty much as soon as Bruce agreed to marry Talia, Ra's decided he was done with his activities in the US."

"That seems odd," Raven contributed her first actual comment in the 'conversation' since it had begun. "I mean, since when do villains—especially terrorists like him—give up so easily?"

"Ra's al-Ghul may have been the Batman's biggest foe," Zatanna noted, "but there's apparently not a man in the world who Ra's respects more. The guy's actually obsessed with the idea that Bruce should father his grandchildren; so of course he was elated when Bruce finally agreed to marry Talia."

"Why's he so worried about grandchildren?" Raven inquired. "I mean, I get it that normal parents want their bloodline to live on, but obsessing over it seems to be a little much."

"In Ra's al-Ghul's case, it's rooted in sexism," Zatanna noted. "The guy wants a male heir to his legacy, but he only produced daughters. He thinks Bruce is the only man alive who is worthy of being the father to his male heir. Even though Talia is probably pretty close to an even match for both Bruce and Ra's in intellect and combat skills—and her sister Nyssa pretty close to a match for her—Ra's still refuses to believe a woman could ever be suited for the role. It's like the guy refuses to see what's right in front of him, and even worse, Talia's a major daddy's girl in spite of the general lack of respect he has for her gender."

"You're saying that like you feel sorry for her," Raven quipped. Zatanna was Bruce's closest friend, so of course she would try to be supportive of him at this point in time, but there are certain things one cannot hide from an empath. The magician was not outwardly expressing it at all, but Raven could sense a kernel of jealousy in Zatanna's unexpressed emotions.

"Well, there's certainly no shortage of things to envy about her," Zatanna knew what Raven was thinking. "And I will freely admit that I have had more-than-platonic feelings for Bruce before. But honestly, Bruce and I decided a long time ago that our respective stations in each other's lives were that of intimate friends and nothing more. He's too dedicated to his work for him and I to have ever worked as a couple." In fact, Bruce had particularly used the rationale that he didn't want to hurt Zatanna in his reasoning for not wanting to pursue a relationship with her. Either way, it presently wasn't something Zatanna was particularly concerned with—she no longer had romantic feelings for the Dark Knight and, although she was still sexually attracted to him, there was no shortage of men who were attracted to the beautiful magician. Though, that isn't to say she was particularly happy with the single life—now in her early thirties, Zatanna was beginning to become conscious of the incessant ticking of her biological clock. The experience of mentoring Misty Kilgore had opened Zatanna's eyes to the fact that she would probably make a good mother and, honestly, she wanted to have that kind of bond again.

_'Awfully strange that she would jump to thinking that _I_ was jealous of Bruce and_ Talia,' the magician thought, before noticing Raven's distraction._ 'Hmm. Why does she keep staring at that Logan kid? Either he's pissed her off again, or...'_ Zatanna suddenly made the realization in mid-thought. _"Hey, W, could you do me a favor?"_ she telepathically asked the Themysciran princess who happened to be right behind herself and the Azarathian at the moment. Raven had a rather noticeable grimace on her face at the moment, as Gar was no longer joking around with the Kents, but had instead wandered into a one-on-one conversation with Bette Kane.

_"I guess that would depend on what the favor would be,"_ Wonder Woman replied. Although they had grown extremely close as friends, it wasn't particularly often that Zatanna would ask her for help with non-professional things. In fact, the last time she had asked for Diana's help in a social matter was when she wanted to take Barbara Gordon out for a night on the town after the magician had a premonitory nightmare about what was going to happen to the then-Batgirl. It was essentially unheard of for Zee to use telepathy to ask for such help.

_"Could you read Beast Boy's, Flamebird's, and Raven's emotions for me?"_ Zatanna was an exceptionally talented magician, whose Homo magi ancestry gave her a large range of psychic powers. Although the mistress of Shadowcrest could read minds—which seemed to be an excessively invasive procedure for such a trivial matter—she was not an empath. The most powerful Amazon, however, was. _"Particularly, I'm curious about what Beast Boy and Flamebird are feeling for each other, and what Raven is feeling for both of the others."_

_"Best I can tell from Bette and Gar is that they have a strong platonic bond, but no romantic feelings for each other. Raven, on the other hand, is feeling overwhelming levels of jealousy toward Bette and romantic longing toward Gar."_ At that moment Beast Boy noticed Raven's stare and Diana was able to get another perspective of his emotional state. _"I know you like things to be interesting, so you're going to _love_ this. Gar is also feeling romantic longing for Raven. But I'm going to guess that Raven's grimaced stare is making him think she's angry at him for something, because he started feeling a touch of apprehension when he noticed Raven staring."_ Wonder Woman herself had to work hard to suppress a laugh at the spectacle of hidden emotions she'd just witnessed—it was like something from a romantic comedy.

_"Oh, to be young, dumb and in love,"_ Zatanna didn't quite look the part, but the fact that her 32nd birthday was now just a few weeks away gave her enough age to credibly make such a comment. _"I suppose I owe Raven a favor,"_ the felt guilty for her part in the Justice League turning Raven away five years earlier, _"wanna help set these kids right?"_

_"Hmm...I don't have anything better to do at the moment, I guess. What are we going to do?"_

_"Just follow my lead,"_ the magician said, concluding her telepathic conversation with the Amazon. "So, Rae, how are things going between you and Beast Boy?" Zatanna turned her attention back to Raven. "I heard you two were living together."

"There's nothing going on," Raven replied in straight monotone. "When the team disbanded, I didn't have anywhere to go or any money to get a place of my own. Being a good friend, he took me in. While we've certainly gotten closer, that's all we are." Her facial expression noticeably saddened at the last sentence.

"No money?" the magician was honestly surprised. "I was in Japan a few years ago and I saw your face all over the place in gum advertisements. I would have thought they'd have paid you royalties for that."

"They did, but it's kind of an embarrassing topic," the Azarathian replied. "Suffice it to say, it was a learning experience. I'm never going to lend my image for product endorsements again without the advice of an attorney and an agent. I'm also never going to lend my image for foreign product endorsements without considering there's often a big difference between the value of currencies."

"Why?" this tangent had piqued Zatanna's curiosity. "How much did they pay you?"

"They used my image for ten months and the monthly total of royalties they paid me was about a hundred thousand yen, overall," Raven said; Zatanna visibly winced at the demi-demoness's reply. "So, yeah...a grand total of one million yen, which converted to about ten thousand dollars. I didn't actually recognize my mistake until the morning we left Tokyo. I saved the ten grand for a while, but then Jump City started cutting our budget and I ended up having to spend it all."

"I wouldn't feel too embarrassed about that, Raven," Wonder Woman chimed in. "Like yourself, I am an implant in man's world. I'm not too familiar with Azarath—I only really know what you've told me—but would I be correct to guess that it's a communal society?"

"Yeah," Raven answered. "I mean, not like in a totally egalitarian way—Azarath has a theocratic system of government and a system of stratification where there's a clerical nobility, albeit the status of nobility only confers responsibility to the people and not rewards. But, yeah, basically the economic system of Azarath is organized on communitarian lines. Why?"

"Themyscira is very similar in that regard," Diana noted. "I heard that Azarath has a matriarchal social orientation and a pacifist moral system. Is that correct?" Raven nodded. "I wouldn't blame you for being taken. I've been in that situation too. To suddenly go from a society based on love and peace to one based on power and greed is a big leap that requires a lot of adjustment. I can certainly sympathize with you, Raven, it takes time to adjust. And it certainly didn't help that being a Titan and living on income from the city kind of insulated you from the reality for a while."

"But it was nice of Beast Boy to help you out," Zatanna added. "John has been a pretty close friend of Steve's for a while, and I visited Dayton Manor with him once—holy shit was that place luxurious! I heard you guys were moving there now?"

"Yeah," Raven replied. "Actually, we moved into Dayton Manor a few days ago. It doesn't quite feel like home yet, though. If it weren't for Gar and Vernon, I'd probably starve to death in that place. I still can't find the kitchen."

The two older women laughed. It was a funny situation, but they both knew she wasn't kidding—in addition to Zatanna having visited the estate with John Constantine, Diana had been there for Donna Troy's wedding (Gar, incidentally, won big favor points with Diana for how kind he was in providing a venue and basically serving as Donna and Terry's wedding planner...even if that marriage was now ending in divorce). The place fell somewhere in between the Forbidden City and the Louvre Palace in its shear size—when they had it built, Steve and Rita were certainly showing off. When you're the fifth-richest man in the world, 'showing off' in building a home will tend to result in something monumental, like the neoclassical palace that was Dayton Manor.

"Do you like it, otherwise?" Zatanna asked, hoping Raven would give her some ammunition. She would not be disappointed.

"Yeah," Raven replied, as a serene look took over her face. "I especially love the library. Gar was so kind, on the first day he and Vernon helped me find space for all of the books I already owned, and on the second day he brought me into the City and bought me a truck-full of whatever other books I wanted," she said as her lips began to curl into a slight smile and her hips began to sway slightly to the side.

"Timda ti!" Zatanna responded. "You love him and you know it. I don't have to be an empath to see that."

"And I _am_ an empath," Diana added, backing the magician up.

"What does it matter if I do?" Raven tacitly admitted her feelings. There was no point in trying to lie about it, these two women could see through it. "I'm not his type."

* * *

**Author's Notes  
**This chapter was difficult for me to write, as I had some serious writer's block going into it. I felt this was a good opportunity for a lot of exposition, though. One theme that continues from earlier in the story is that the defeat of the Brotherhood of Evil ultimately marks a watershed within my continuity where the Titans stopped being just a group of kids and became a very serious threat to organizations like the Injustice League. Not so much of a threat to the League of Assassins, but something about the event nevertheless changed Ra's al-Ghul's perception of his strategies toward achieving his ultimate goal. What that is, you can guess for now, but it'll be revealed in time. I also figured it was nice to spend some time at the beginning of the chapter inside the mind of Batman, even though he's a somewhat minor character to this story.

This was another one of those chapters where I wanted to write it as one but ended up splitting it into multiple chapters because of its length. I'm not sure whether this is going to be a two chapter arc or if there are going to be more—I'm kinda flying by the seat of my pants at this point.

Also, some more words on the application of the ACD rule in this series. One of the exceptions is that I'm going to be extremely hesitant to have children dying in the story. This is partly because I find it pretty annoying that every time a Titan had a child in the comics, the kid always seemed to end up dying in early youth/infancy (Robert Long, Lian Harper, Cerdian Garth-son, etc.). For that matter, it also bugs me that the same things seems to always happen with children of Justice Leaguers too (Arthur Curry, Jr., Damian Wayne, etc.). But ACD will still apply even to children, it's just that the child mortality rate will be _significantly_ lower than in the comics.

I'd also like to note that, although I've already confirmed that I'm planning to include Mar'i Grayson in this series (mainly in the sequels, of course) and it does seem like the universe in this story is beginning to tend toward running out of villains, I do not plan on going in the direction of something like _Kingdom Come_ with this. That said, I'm taking all kinds of ideas from all kinds of directions, and there's certainly a lot of ideas that I'm borrowing from _Kingdom Come_, among others, but I don't really want to go for the superheroes vs. superheroes vs. humanity thing. That said, I do plan on carrying the sequels a _long_ way into the future (to the point where by the later sequels, the children of the Titans will be adults).

Also, just for fun (I've already got most of my mind made up as to where this will go, but I still might pick up reviewers' requests if I feel like I can fit them into the story), which characters would you like to see reproducing, and in what pairings?

_**wolf 1492-**_ Thank you. I hope the story continues to be enjoyable in the future.

_**Guest-**_ Clinical is definitely what I was shooting for. I wanted to show Raven returning to her normal, very rational personality.

_**Annatheavidreader-**_ Dang! I was hoping the spoiler about Dick and Kori's time on Tamaran would slip by without being noticed, but I guess I did leave it there for two and two to be put together. I'd say not to expect character deaths until either the final or penultimate act of this fic (then again, I'm not really writing with much of an act structure anyway, so it'd be hard to really quantify that), but it could still happen at any time, if a moment comes up in the story where it feels right. Everyone's been safe so far because there hasn't really been any fighting before this chapter, but that'll be changing soon enough. Anyway, you've been waiting for Batman's wedding for a while; I hope this chapter doesn't disappoint.

_**Hairul The Nightrage Beast-**_ As far as killing off one of the core five Titans goes, even though ACD is in effect, I will say that there's a good 75% chance that all five will still be alive at the beginning of the first sequel to this story. I have already decided upon one of the five who is going to die in that sequel, but I'm not saying who or how until it happens.

_**shugokage-**_ Thanks. That chapter was certainly easier for me to write than this one, though. lol

_**JasonVUK-**_ Sorry about that.

_**LiumD-**_ I didn't mean to imply that Cyborg will be dying any time soon. He might, but I presently have no plan on killing him off during the course of this fic.

_**re: MBTI types-**_ A lot of you seemed to have trouble with this aspect of the previous chapter, and I admit I probably should have included some explanations. INTJ, ISTJ, ENFP, etc. are all Myers-Briggs types. Basically, what the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator does is types personalities on the basis of four binary dichotomies relative to attitudes (**I**ntroversion vs. **E**xtraversion), perceiving functions (**S**ensing vs. i**N**tuition), judging functions (**T**hinking vs. **F**eeling), and lifestyle (**J**udging vs. **P**erceiving). More information about the MBTI system and the sixteen MBTI types can be found on Wikipedia and on websites like typelogic and personalitypage, among others (I can't link you there because fanfiction won't let me). I've read a few books on the subject largely because I've found the typological classifications of personalities to be very interesting. Sorry about that. That was one of my more selfish chapters.


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